Encroachment
National Real Estate Exam glossary · Property Ownership
Definition
The unauthorized intrusion of an improvement—a fence, eave, or driveway—onto an adjoining owner's land. An encroachment is a trespass that can cloud title and, if left unchallenged for the statutory period, ripen into a prescriptive easement.
Encroachment in plain English
An encroachment is when part of one person's stuff — a fence, a roof edge, a driveway — sticks over onto the neighbor's land without permission. It matters because it's technically trespassing on someone else's property, and it can make the land harder to sell since a buyer sees a boundary problem. Imagine your neighbor builds a fence two feet into your yard: that fence is an encroachment. If nobody complains about it for a long enough time set by law, the person doing it can sometimes gain a legal right to keep using that strip.
Practice Encroachment
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