Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land. This video is the third in a series on legal access. And what legal access means is the legal right to get to your property, whether it’s through an easement or an actual physical road that leads to the property. And we’ve discussed in the previous videos why this is important, why TB Properties asks you as a land seller, do you know if you’ve got legal access to the property? And if you don’t know that, do you have a copy of your deed so that we can look to see if that’s spelled out within the deed?
In the last video, we talked about one example of what happens when, some of the consequences, I guess, if you don’t have legal access to your property. I want to share you another one. This one was a little bit more substantial. So we were working with the property owner. He had loved this property. It was a mountainside just covered in timber. It was a great recreational property for hunting, for four-wheeling just messing around, but it was a fair weather property. We knew the roads weren’t great, but he had some good logging roads that had gone up there.
Now it had been about four or five years since he had last been at the property since he was out of state. He’d held onto it and he was ready to finally get rid of it. So we looked at the property and the title commitment that came back after sending this to the title process was that they did not have legal access. So Tim and I were evaluating, is this worth the risk? It doesn’t have legal access, which one, we know that the access is not going to be able to be insured through the title company. And two, we know that it’s going to be harder for someone to get a loan. They will not be able to get a bank loan on this property if it does not have legal access.
So we were still trying to evaluate whether it was worth the risk of purchasing this property. And we were doing some digging. We came to find out that these logging roads that looked really substantial on Google Earth, they had recently been decommissioned by the US Forest Service. And what that means is that they didn’t simply just put up a barricade, they tore up the roads. I mean, they were just totally torn up. There were no vehicles that could get across that road. The only way up there would’ve been on foot and that would’ve been for miles and miles across private landowners’ land.
So they shut down those roads purposefully so that people could not get there. At this point in time, this property is now worthless. You cannot get there physically, there’s not a way to physically get there. And legally, you’re not allowed to get up there. So for this poor landowner who owns this property, his property is now worthless, unless someone’s got a helicopter and they’re allowed airspace to get up there and be dropped off on that property, there’s no way to get there. So this is one of the reasons that we ask you as the land seller, do you know if you’ve got legal access to it?
We’ll talk about the different forms of access in another video, but I did want to let you know some of these examples that we’ve run across, which is why we’re so insistent upon asking about this. It’s not just put roadblocks up, it’s because this really has value and there are some very real consequences to not having legal access to your property.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us. If you’ve got vacant bear land that you are ready to sell. If it’s inherited, if you’ve owned it and the dream has changed, check in with us, we’re happy to give you a quote on your property. We are available via email, phone, or across the little form on our website. Look forward to hearing from you. Thanks again.