Legal Question in Securities Law in California

Re: civil dispute about property line

File a quiet title or other lawsuit.

Re: civil dispute about property line

Real property can't be stolen.

If a neighbor attempts to create the appearance that a property line is somewhere other than where the deed descriptions, coupled with a good survey, show it to be, the attempt is probably ineffective. There are some important qualifications to this very general statement, however.

One of these is that portions of an adjoining property can be acquired, or an easement therein obtained, by what are called adverse possession and prescription, respectively.

Adverse possession requires the party who claims against the owner of record title to have been in possession of the land continuously, openly and adversely for five years, and to have paid all the property taxes on the land claimed. The requirements for adverse possession are rather difficult to meet, and in particular adverse possession claims usuall founder on the tax-payment requirement. Most urban properties are assessed largely based upon deed descriptions and permit applications, and appraisers working for the assessor seldom use field inspection to determine the value of a parcel; thus, location of the fence, etc. does not come into play and the tax bill you pay is probably for all the land described in your deed.

Prescriptive easements usually don't require payment of property taxes by the claimant, because easements aren't usually assessed separately from the fee. However, California courts have recently been very reluctant to award neighbors prescriptive easements where doing so, e.g. for a wall, garden, etc. would eventually deprive the owner of the fee of his rights of possession and use. Prescriptive easements such as access easements, that do not give the easement holder exclusive rights, are more readily found and granted by the courts, but that does not seem to be your situation.

In addition to adverse possession and prescriptive easements, a property owner might need to be concerned about the "agreed boundary" principle. In older times, when surveys were less accurate and less often performed, and property descriptions in deeds made references to temporary objects like "a 40-inch oak stump," courts often held that the boundary between adjoinig ranches was where the parties' grandparents (or whatever) had built the rock wall a century ago. This legal theory is still valid and applied when there is no better way to determine the boundary, but in modern urban settings it is rarely applied.

If a neighbor is encroaching and refuses to recognize a surveyed boundary, the proper action may be a suit for trespass and/or ejectment. If there are actual doubts about title, it may be necessary to add quiet title or cloud-removal causes of action, but not usually.