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Service areas in the yard of a building\u2014such as alleys, access ways and landscaped strips that by their nature or purpose serve all owners\u2014fall under the regime of common parts. The Ownership Act provides that, in buildings under condominium ownership, the land on which the building stands, the yard and everything which by its nature or purpose serves common use are common parts and are not subject to partition. This means that service areas are, as a rule, held in ideal (undivided) shares by all owners and cannot be segmented and acquired as separate real parts through prescription.<\/p>\n
Acquisitive prescription generally requires continuous possession as one\u2019s own for ten years, and five years in good-faith possession on a valid legal ground. This rule applies only to property that may be acquired by prescription under its legal regime. When common parts of a condominium are concerned, an individual owner cannot transform a service area into his or her own real part, because common parts may not be partitioned or separately formed. Acquisition by prescription is conceivable only as to ideal shares among co-owners and only under strict conditions: the possessor must clearly, continuously and unequivocally manifest outward an intent to exclude the others, i.e., convert holding into possession against them. In practice this is particularly difficult to prove in relation to a yard and service areas which, by their nature, are for common use.<\/p>\n
An important qualification concerns the very status of the land. The land is not always a common part: where the building is erected on another person\u2019s plot under a right to build (superficies), the owners of the self-contained units do not acquire ideal shares in the land. The plot remains owned by its titleholder, while unit owners derive their rights from the right to build. In such cases questions about \u201cservicing\u201d the building on someone else\u2019s land arise under the law of superficies and servitudes, not under the rules on common parts.<\/p>\n
There is also a hard limit: public state or public municipal property cannot be acquired by prescription. If the service area is part of such public property, prescription is excluded by law regardless of who possesses it and for how long.<\/p>\n
In summary, acquisition by prescription of service areas as physically separated parts in a condominium is inadmissible because they are common parts and cannot be partitioned or separately formed. Acquisition of ideal shares among co-owners is theoretically possible only upon strict proof of exclusive possession vis-\u00e0-vis the others. The primary status of the land must always be verified: where there is a right to build, the land is not a common part of the unit owners; public property lies outside the scope of acquisitive prescription.<\/p>\n