The High Court awarded a building contractor €33,201 after finding that a property developer breached a contract by selling him a site that included land owned by the Office of Public Works (OPW).
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Noonan on 20 June 2017, concerns a 2006 sale of land in Bangor, County Mayo. The written agreement described a site of about 0.992 hectares for €290,000. After the sale closed, the purchaser discovered that a strip along the eastern boundary belonged to the OPW. The land he acquired measured 0.717 hectares, 27.7 per cent less than the agreed area.
The vendor argued that a contract clause stating that the purchaser had inspected the property and knew its boundaries prevented him from claiming under another clause covering errors. The judge rejected that argument. He accepted the purchaser’s evidence that the inspection and map provided by the auctioneer gave him the clear impression that the boundary was a line of bushes east of a land drain. The judge found that the inspection clause concerned the physical inspection and did not make the purchaser responsible for identifying the boundary from older title maps.
The judge also rejected the vendor’s account that he had told the auctioneer the drain marked the boundary. He found that the vendor believed he owned the OPW land, and that this belief had led to its inclusion in maps used for planning applications and in the contract map. The mistake was the vendor’s alone, the judge said; there was no common mistake between the parties.
The reduced site required a revised planning application and substantially changed the layout of two proposed houses, leaving them with smaller gardens. The purchaser claimed various losses, including reduced value and additional costs. On the first day of trial, he advanced a new calculation based on the area lost and interest on borrowing; he abandoned the interest claim after the vendor objected. The judge rejected a pro-rata valuation of the land as the proper measure of loss, noting that the reduced site still accommodated the four houses originally contemplated.
Instead, the court assessed the loss from the smaller gardens at €10,000 each for two plots and €5,000 for a third plot affected by a lost triangular area. It added €8,201 for 27.7 per cent of the transaction costs, producing a total award of €33,201. The judgment ordered judgment for that amount.