Beth:
Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land. Today, we’re going to cover another case study; this one involves a gentleman and his sister. They had inherited land that was passed down to them from their grandmother. The problem they had with their land was that it had no access at all: it did not have a road, nor did it have legal access.
We’ve had some videos in the past that explain what legal access is, but it often means that there’s an easement, which is a legal permission allowing you onto the property along a certain path, even if there is no physical road. Typically this would be something written into one of the deeds, that’s passed down, again, stating that you have the legal right to cross the neighboring land to get to your property.
Regarding the landowners, they didn’t have legal access to get to their property, nor did they have a road, or physical access to their property. What did this mean for them? It means that their land’s value is much lower than other nearby properties that have access and it was going to be very difficult for them to sell. Who is going to want to purchase their property if they don’t have a road or a legal way to get there? In a way, they were stuck. They reached out to TB Properties Buys Land, and we were able to work with them but… we went through some pretty crazy processes along the way!
Since this is Texas land, we went to the Texas Department of Transportation, and we worked with them. We had to get the okays from neighboring property owners in order for TXDOT to allow us a path into the property. We also had to work with a surveyor to get a new survey. There were a lot of hoops that we had to jump through in order to purchase their property and they most certainly weren’t cheap.
Is this something that they could have done on their own? Yeah, probably, but they would’ve had a lot to learn in order to make this happen and on the flip side, they could have potentially spent a lot of money and ended up with nothing. In the end, they went from having a piece of property that had been passed down from their grandmother, which had little value since it lacked legal access, to being able to actually sell it and make some decent money. I mean, think about the risk in owning and using land with no legal access: if you’re crossing your neighbor’s property to get to yours and they think you’re trespassing, they can shoot you, right? Or they could think or say that you’re trespassing, and they could have you arrested. As you can see, the legal access was a huge problem for them, but they were able to work with TB Properties Buys Land.
Regarding their land sale, we were able to work through those issues and purchased their property from them for cash. They are super, super happy about that situation. Did it take longer to close? Absolutely. There was a lot of things that we had to do in order to close through the title company, but we were able to close through title and they do have title insurance on the sale of the property.
The greatest part for them about the deal is that they were paid in cash; when they drove up there to close in person, they were handed a check from the title company. It was a success for them. Again, if you have inherited property, if you’ve got some issues with your property, feel free to reach out to us. We have a lot of experience and can see if we can help turn around a problem property.
Not all properties are able to be closed, but we do have a lot of experience, and many of those things we can work through. We always close through title, we pay in cash, we close quickly, we cover all your closing costs. We look forward to working with you. Please feel free to reach out to us. Thanks again for listening.