When Two Titles Cover the Same Land: A Case Every Buyer Should Know

Kingston, Jamaica, 12 August 2015. A case decided in Jamaica’s courts and confirmed on appeal offers one of the clearest illustrations available of how adverse possession works in practice when two registered titles overlap. The dispute arose when a company that purchased land in 2011, receiving a registered certificate of title in the process, discovered that a neighbouring landholder held a separate registered title that covered the same area of land. Both parties had registered titles for the same ground. The question before the courts was which registered title would survive.

The outcome turned not on which title was registered first, or on which party had a more recent transaction, but on which party had been in continuous, open, and undisturbed possession of the disputed ground for more than twelve years before the claim was brought. The neighbouring landholder had occupied and used the contested area since the 1970s and 1980s. The company that sought to assert its registered title in 2011 had purchased from a previous owner who had obtained registration in 1978, but the occupation of the disputed ground by the neighbour predated that registration and had continued without interruption. The court found that by the time the company purchased in 2011, the limitation period had already run and the original registered title had been extinguished by adverse possession. The company’s title was, in effect, void at the moment of purchase, because it derived from a title that had already been lost to adverse possession before the sale was made.

This is an outcome that surprises most non-lawyers when they first encounter it. The widely held assumption is that a registered Certificate of Title provides absolute protection against any claim, including adverse possession. Jamaica’s Torrens system, which underlies its land registration framework, does confer very strong protection on registered proprietors, but it does not override the Limitation of Actions Act. The Registration of Titles Act explicitly makes the certificate of title subject to the operation of any statute of limitations. What this means in practice is that a squatter’s long-term occupation can extinguish a registered title, and a buyer who purchases from a seller whose title has already been extinguished by adverse possession acquires nothing, regardless of whether either party was aware of the occupation when the transaction was completed.

The case has been cited consistently by Jamaican property lawyers since the Court of Appeal’s decision, and the Privy Council’s subsequent engagement with a closely related adverse possession question in the British Virgin Islands further confirmed that the principle is not unique to Jamaica but operates across the common law Caribbean. The doctrine reaches registered land. It extinguishes titles. And it does so retrospectively, meaning that the legal loss of ownership occurs at the end of the limitation period, not when a court subsequently confirms it.

For property buyers in Jamaica, the practical lesson of this case is that a title search and a valid certificate of title are necessary but not sufficient elements of due diligence. A buyer must also establish, through physical inspection and enquiry, whether any part of the property being purchased is occupied by someone who is not the seller and who has been in that occupation for a period that might trigger or have already triggered the twelve-year rule. This is particularly important for older properties, rural land, and parcels that have passed through multiple transactions over many decades, where the history of occupation may be imperfectly reflected in the formal title record.

The case also underscores why Jamaica’s current land reform drive, particularly the push to register unregistered land and to alert registered owners to applications against their property through the e-Title system, is so consequential. A registration system that captures the actual occupation of land, rather than only the paper chain of title, is a stronger foundation for the property market than one in which the formal record and the physical reality routinely diverge. Until that gap is closed, cases of the kind described here will continue to arise, and buyers will continue to bear the risk of discovering, after a purchase is complete, that what they thought they owned had already been lost before the transaction was signed.