A land easement allows access to land owned by someone else, often for utilities or natural resources. It’s important to check for easements before buying property, as they can restrict building. Different types of easements exist, including prescriptive and floating easements. Easement issues are common among adjacent property owners and are legally recorded for future reference.
A land easement gives a person, creature, or thing the right to walk on or encroach on land that is owned by someone else. Common easements include accessing another’s property for ingress and egress, to install service lines or sewer pipes, to reach sources of natural spring water, to perform urgent fence or landslide repairs, or to make pass herds or group of animals. In rural areas, a land easement is routinely granted to allow a person to reach their otherwise landlocked home.
Before buying a lot or home, it’s important to check if there is an easement on the property with the public works department or public records office. Because easements are transferred whenever land or property is sold, they sometimes go undetected for years. They can crop up, however, if a landlord plans to make significant changes to the land by installing a hot tub or pool or building a new fence. Easements prohibit any building on top of them and require a formal waiver of the property or homeowner to proceed with their project.
There are different types of land easements. Sometimes a land easement is dictated by existing deeds and documents; others are created from addendums to newly agreed upon ownership and lease documents. Most communities, counties, and cities have public works, design review, and land use boards that review citizen requests for easements and easement relief.
A prescriptive easement is the more assertive and aggressive type. It is usually a claim based on a claim that the property in question has been used by a person for five continuous years without the owner’s knowledge or consent. This is often the case for someone walking or running in a remote or rural area and crossing land located between or near areas of public land. An easement of necessity or equity is similar and allows access to landlocked land based on the needs of the landlocked land or the homeowner.
Other easements are granted based on specific limits. Sometimes the boundaries are stated exactly, such as “100 feet (3048 cm) wide along the eastern property line to the front street,” and other times the terms are rather vague, such as “along the narrow path extending to to the barbed wire”. barbed wire fence”. In still other cases, the easement instructions are quite general, such as “to provide access to the Phillips riding paddock”, and are regularly referred to as floating easement. In residential neighborhoods, negative easements are common when new construction is anticipated that will block existing residents’ views or vistas.
Easement issues are more common among owners of adjacent properties. They are regularly resolved in public hearings and legally recorded for future reference. Once properly entered into landlords’ records, easements remain intact and are passed on to future generations through contracts, deeds, wills, and codicils.
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