“There was no easement on my title. There was one line I didn’t understand — and it cost me $26,400”

She did everything a careful buyer is told to do. She still inherited a private rulebook she never signed.

The situation

She is 39. Eighteen months ago she bought a townhouse in a small mixed-use development — nine dwellings around a ground-floor commercial tenancy — her second property and the first she bought alone.

She was not careless. She ordered a title search and read it, looking specifically for easements because a friend had been caught by one. The title showed none. She asked her solicitor whether anything registered would restrict what she could do with the property, and was told nothing would stop her renovating it.

Eighteen months later she received a levy notice for $26,400 — her share of replacing a shared fire and mechanical services system, plus three years of contributions accruing since settlement. When she disputed it, she was sent a document registered against her lot before the developer had sold a single dwelling.

It set out who maintains what, rights of access through her lot for services, a management group with power to strike levies, and architectural standards she had to meet before changing anything visible from outside. It bound her as a successor in title.

One line on her title search referenced it. She had read it without knowing what it meant.

The question she asked us

"I searched the title. There were no easements. Nobody hid anything from me — the reference was right there. How can a document I never signed, agreed to, or was walked through create a right of access through my property and a bill for $26,400? And if it's that powerful, why isn't it treated like an easement?"

It is a fair question, and the answer is uncomfortable, because nothing went wrong in the sense she means. The system worked exactly as designed.

The answer

There is a class of registered instrument that lets the owners of lots inside or adjoining a building create a private set of rules governing those lots — and have those rules bind everyone who ever owns them afterwards.

It must deal with four things: supply of services, rights of access, rights of support and shelter, and insurance. It may also deal with a longer, more consequential list: establishing a management group, imposing and recovering levies, property maintenance, architectural and landscaping standards, and proposed future development.

Read that list with a buyer's eyes. It is a private government with a taxing power, attaching to the lot rather than the person.

First: it works without an easement. The instrument expressly provides that a right of access, support or shelter — or any other right in the nature of an easement — may operate according to its terms and be effective despite the absence of a formal registered easement establishing the right. Her search was not sloppy; it answered a different question than the one she needed answered. She looked for easements and found none, because the rights running through her lot were never framed as easements.

Second: registration is not a quality check. The registrar records a reference to the instrument on the title for each affected lot, and is expressly not obliged to examine it — not for validity, not for consistency with the plan of subdivision, not for compliance. That reference proved the document existed. It proved nothing about whether it was fair or properly made.

Third: it binds successors in title, and one party can create it. It may be registered even where every lot has the same registered owner — so a developer can register it against itself, in the form it prefers, before a single buyer exists. Where a lot it applies to is later subdivided, it applies automatically to every new lot the plan creates. One signature at the start can bind dozens of owners a decade later, much like an order that attaches to the premises rather than the tenancy and transfers to the buyer — except here the burden is private.

Then comes the part that decides what happens next. Amending it requires the signature of the registered owners of all the lots it applies to. Extinguishing it requires the same — plus the consent of every registered mortgagee of every affected lot. One neighbour who likes the current arrangement, or one lender who cannot be bothered, is a complete veto. The only route around unanimity is a court order.

Cheap to impose. Near impossible to lift.

The fairness argument, honestly

This is not a loophole. Buildings with interlocking structures genuinely need a durable way to allocate maintenance, access, support and insurance; if those arrangements evaporated every time a lot changed hands, no such building could be financed or maintained.

There are real protections, too. A clause forcing disputes away from a court is ineffective to the extent it tries to stop a court finally determining the matter. And the law is markedly stricter about private covenants — those can generally only run to a State body or local government, must not conflict with the planning scheme, and expressly do not extend to architectural, construction or landscaping standards. Which is the sharpest fact here: the legislature decided private architectural controls were serious enough to keep out of covenants, then left them available in the other instrument.

What this means for you

Two townhouses can sit four hundred metres apart in the same suburb and return a word-for-word identical research summary. Same median, same growth rate, same school catchment, same vacancy rate — every number the same number. One carries an unremovable private levy power and a management group that must approve the colour of your front door. The other carries nothing.

No suburb-level metric will ever tell you which is which. A median has never once been sent a levy notice — the same blind spot that lets a register keyed to the land, with nothing on the title, hand an owner a bill years later.

This is why street- and property-level data matters more than suburb averages. The spread between the best and worst streets inside a single suburb regularly runs 20–30% on effective yield once you measure achieved rents rather than asking rents, real vacancy duration and true days-on-market. Recurring holding obligations belong in that same column.

The practical fix is small. Every one of those provisions was registered, public and readable months before her offer — the same lesson as reading the rules early rather than meeting them late. What she lacked was one question: is there any registered instrument affecting this lot other than an easement or mortgage — and if so, what does it require me to pay, permit and get approved? Ask it in writing, get the document itself rather than a summary, and read the levy clause and the amendment clause first — those two decide your exposure and your exit.

Risk you cannot see is a threat. Risk you can read before you sign is a line item — and a priced line item is an advantage over every other buyer who glanced at the same reference and moved on.

She did not lose $26,400 to a dishonest developer or an unfair law. She lost it to a single line on a title search that she read, and that nobody had ever taught her to open.