Inheritance vs. hereditary development right
Today, a favorable ruling was announced for the law firm’s clients, in which the court found that they had acquired ownership of a developed property in Sołacz by way of an order of succession.
The court shared the law firm’s position that the acquisition was made in good faith. The clients remained in the rightful belief that they had acquired ownership of the property years ago, as was clear from the sales contract and the copy of the land register at the time. Only after thirty years did it turn out that the subject of the acquisition was only a hereditary development right, which, incidentally, had expired.
The hereditary building right is an institution of Prussian law, still functioning incidentally
in our legal order, raising enormous interpretative and practical problems. In the case at hand, the existence of this right escaped the attention of the State Notary Office, which prepared the notarial deed in the 1980s, which only created the risk of losing the property to the City of Poznań for clients thirty years later.