Caveats, easements and covenants outline legal restrictions relating to your property. The team at WGC Lawyers brings over fifty years of experience to helping Cairns residents understand their rights. To learn about these three distinct legal documents, read below. Call today.
Property Lawyer in Cairns: Caveats
This legal notice cautions anyone dealing with a specific property of an existing claim, halting all proceedings and preventing the owner from selling or transferring.
Types of Caveats
You can lodge various caveats, each for different circumstances, including:
- Equitable interest: If you have a claim to a property based on an agreement, such as a promise to transfer
- Legal interest: If you have a legal interest in the property, such as an unregistered mortgage or lease
- Purchaser: After signing a contract to purchase a property, this ensures the owner cannot sell it to anyone else
- Executor: When the executor of an estate is protecting the deceased’s interests during probation
How Caveats Affect Transactions
As expert property lawyer in Cairns, we will help you understand caveats. They can impact the sale of a property by:
- Halting a sale or transfer
- Preventing the owner from refinancing
- Leading to legal disputes
- Protecting interests
Conveyancing in Cairns: Covenants
This document controls what a landowner may do with land. They maintain the quality of the land and provide housing development standards for future construction. Covenants set:
- Size allowances for buildings
- Energy standards
- Restrictions or allowances for construction materials
- Regulations on other structures
How to Remove a Covenant
You can attempt to remove a covenant from your property through:
- Common ownership: If you own the land that benefits from activities and construction, and the land that is burdened by it
- Express release: If you and the other party agree to extinguish it
- Implied release: if the character of the neighbourhood changes, the owner’s usage is inconsistent with the covenant or the owner disregards breaches enough to predict future breaches
Failure to Comply
Breaching a covenant may cause:
- Damages, such as loss of value to the property
- Positive or negative injunctions
- Specific performance, which is an equitable remedy
- Recission when the owner cancels the contract
- Rectification of the covenant
Legal Documents: Easements
As a trusted provider of conveyancing in Cairns, our team will guide you through easements, which prevent or allow you to use land in a certain way.
Types of Easement
There are many easement types, including:
- Easement of way: Using a specific piece of land, such as a shared driveway
- Easement of support: Sharing a wall or other building with a neighbour
- Services easement: Delivering essential services, such as electricity
- Light and air easement: Preventing construction that inhibits the view or light of your neighbour
How to Create an Easement
Easements arise through:
- Express grants through an approved, recorded transfer
- General words implied in conveyances
- Legislation
- An implied grant or reservation by the law
- Prescription for long-term use for at least twenty years
- Acquiescence or estoppel because of deceit by the owner
Trust the team at WGC Lawyers in Cairns with all your property needs. Contact us online today.