Beth:
Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land. Today, I’m going to discuss access to your property and what it exactly means. Here at TB Properties Buys Land, we may mail offer letters to landowners with a specific offer price or perhaps even, a range offer price to buy your raw land from you. Within our offer letter, we mention that one of the conditions for purchasing is that the property must have legal and physical access. What do we mean when we ask for access? Physical access is going to mean a road. Most of the time, we’re looking for a county road or even a local farm to market road is acceptable because we know that someone’s going to be maintaining it. We know that no matter what time of year, you can get to the property because the road is being maintained.
A private road still counts as physical access to the property, but now we have to dig deeper and evaluate the condition of the road, the cost of upkeep and if neighbors are helping with upkeep or perhaps even contributing to advanced wear.
Now, what if your property doesn’t have a road to it? There’s a lot of property that I’ve looked at that doesn’t have a road to it at all! If there is no road, the next question that we ask is, “Do you have legal access to it?” A word that you may have heard before is an easement. Is there an easement for you to cross neighboring parcels of land, your neighbor’s land, to get to your parcel? That is very important to know. Where might you find that information? Most of the time, you will find this on your deed. Better yet, if you’ve got a survey of your property and the surrounding areas, oftentimes they’ll illustrate exactly where it is. In the full legal description of your property on the deed it will call out the different easements your property may have. For example, there may be an easement for the electric company to maintain power lines or there may be a water line easement, that sort of thing.
What may be the most important easement to check on is an access easement. This will determine if you have legal access to your property or not. Here is why this is important to consider: Perhaps you have visited the property on numerous occasions and you know your neighbor, Joe Bob, quite well. Perhaps he’s been fine with you crossing his property to get to yours, and you don’t think anything of it. But what happens when Joe Bob sells his land and the new landowner isn’t so happy about you trespassing across his property to access yours? Yes, trespassing! Now you are committing a crime by crossing someone else’s property to get onto yours if there is not an access easement in place.
That’s why, here at TB Properties Buys land, we’re going to ask you, “Do you have physical access to your property?” Oftentimes we can already see that from satellite images. If we do not see a good county road to the property, we will probably follow up with: “Do you have an easement to access your property?” If you don’t have a copy of the deed, maybe this is inherited property, you may not know that. It may take paying for a survey to find that out. Furthermore, we have to determine if that is worth going down that path.
There are some states where it may be easier to fight in court for access, but that can be very expensive and definitely time consuming as well as uncertain. Still, there may be legal remedies if worthwhile. In any case, I hope you have a better understanding of physical and legal access, their importance and why we ask those questions. It is a topic that comes up a lot!
Here at TB Properties Buys Land, we purchase rural land all over the country. It doesn’t matter where you’re located. We pay you cash so that you get paid faster. We always close through a title company so that the transaction can be safe and secure. A Title Company will require that we send over only certified funds so that there are no risks of checks bouncing or that sort of thing and they prepare all of the paperwork. If you have 10+ acres of vacant land to sell, please feel free to reach out to us across email or through our website or even give us a call. We’re happy to look at your property and get you a quote. Thanks again for listening.