Restrictive Covenants – The Price Of Modification

Whether you are a private landowner looking to sell your land to a developer for housing or wishing to take advantage of that large garden plot to build an extra house on the land, restrictive covenants create problems that need to be thought through at a very early stage.

Having identified that your land is burdened by a restrictive covenant and for the purposes of this article the covenant in question will be that only one residential building can be erected on the land. What do you do next?

Only the owner of the land that has the benefit of the covenant can enforce the covenant. This is further complicated by the "Building Scheme". Effectively, when developers buy land and then sell off the houses they have built on them, they generally do not want to be left owning a small piece of the original land or having to deal with subsequent owners of the plots complaining that other owners are breaching covenants.