Beth :
Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land. In this series where we go behind the scenes and look what’s happening inside TB Properties Buys Land, we’ve talked a lot about what we look for in a piece of land when we’re willing to make an offer on your property, basically whether we are willing to make an offer or not. One of the things that we talk about a lot is access. In case you were not aware, there are different types of access. We’ve talked about legal access, as well as physical access. I want to give an example from a piece of property we were reviewing in order to make an offer. This property happened to be in Harrison County, Texas. The property looked great. It was right there on an FM Road, a farm to market road. It had quite a bit of road frontage so the seller thought, obviously, of course you can get on this property, this is a great property.
Why would you even question if there’s access to this property? Well, there was a couple things. First, if you look at this on Google Earth, you see that long stretch of FM road frontage. However, when you go to Street View, you can actually see that there was a bridge with a guardrail and there was no way to get on the property for half of the property that was blocked by the guardrail. As far as the other half, when you look at the topography, there was quite a drop in elevation from the FM road down to a creek. Essentially, in order to get on the property, you would really have to build a sort of bridge over that creek. That’s not even talking about the fact that this is a farm to market road, which has its own challenges.
If this was a county road, it would be a little bit different. With the farm to market roads, you have to get the necessary permissions and permits. This was is the State of Texas, so you’d have to get permission from TxDOT, which is the Texas Department of Transportation. If this was in Florida, it’d be the Florida Department of Transportation, and so forth. The different state Departments of Transportation allow a driveway every so many feet in certain areas. The distance can depend on the speed limit, slope of road, bends in the road and more. It depends on the area. One thing to keep in mind is if there are already a lot of driveways in the area around where your property is located. They may not be able to issue any more driveway permits. The point I’m trying to make is that even if topography is cooperating, just because your property is on an FM road, a state or US highway, if may not be a “for sure” that you will get driveway approval. In this case, we weren’t even talking to TxDOT yet. We were just trying to see if there was a way to get on this property physically that was going to be affordable. Additionally, when it comes to a creek like that, there may be some environmental factors that have to be considered.
Sadly, to them, this looked like a prime piece of property. They initially thought: of course, I’ve got access! They were assuming that. As for you, a landowner, possibly selling your property, these are things to consider when trying to put a value to your land and come up with a dollar value you think your property is worth.
Another example we had, was a different type of access issue. A land owner had inherited a piece of property in which the front part of the property had been sold off to somebody else. When I say the front part, it was the part with county road frontage. Their property was considered the back end of that property, in which there was no road into their property from that county road. Additionally, there appeared to be no access easement or what we might call no legal access to the property. And so, this looked like a beautiful piece of property to own, but there was no way to get to it. When we looked at the past deed, we did not see an access easement into this property that would provide any legal way to get to the property.
On top of not having a physical road, even if there was an access easement, the distance from the county road to the property line was around 600 yards; that is 600 yards of road that would need to be put in. It was a lot. There’d be clearing involved, getting permission from the neighbor, and then of course, the expense of going all that way.
These examples are not meant to scare you but merely to share that just because you’re savvy enough to get on Google Earth and see road frontage, that does not guarantee access. Access is not always guaranteed, even when it looks obvious. I just wanted to share that with you because these were recent examples and it the access questions or concerns happen more than you would imagine.
In any case, here at TB Properties Buys Land, we buy vacant land all over the country. We try to offer fair prices, we close through title companies and pay with cash so that we can try to close quickly. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us. Thanks again for listening.