Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land and today we’re going to talk about legal access and why we discuss this so often. If you received a letter in the mail with an offer to purchase your rural vacant land from TB Properties Buys Land, one of the contingencies, or one of the requirements that we mention is that your property have a physical road going to the property as well as legal access to get onto your property.
What does that necessarily man and why is that so important? You might be thinking, “hey, I’ve got a road going to my property. How is it not legal for me to access my property? Of course it should be legal for me to have access to my property!” Without going into specifics, because laws are different in every state and things differ in every county, I’m going to just make sure I generalize here. Legal access is just what it sounds like: you are granted in a legal fashion the right to access your property and generally, this is written into the deed. If you were deeded this property, or maybe this is inherited property and this was deeded to your parents or a family member, normally within that deed it’s going to say that you have something called “ingress and egress across existing roads” to get to the property. Oftentimes, if you closed through a title company, they would have included a plat map and that would show you the planned map of the subdivision as well as the road you would be able to legall use to access your property.
There are cases where properties are landlocked for whatever reason. Some counties are worse than others with regards to this and perhaps you can physically get there. Maybe you’re traversing across somebody else’s land. Maybe you’ve got a verbal agreement with a neighbor. Perhaps they tell you that’s fine to cross their land, but legally, if that neighbor that you have a verbal agreement with, if they sell that property and somebody decides to put up a fence, they put up a gate, they have no trespassing signs, they pull out their rifle and they say, “If someone’s trespassing on my property, I’m going to shoot them,” that puts you in a delicate situation. This is why legal access is so important where you have guaranteed access to your property in the legal fashion.
As I mentioned before, this will generally be spelled out on your deed. So if Tim or I call you and we talk to you and say, “Hey, okay, I’m looking at your property. I don’t see a road going to it. Do you even have legal access to this property?” That’s what we mean by this. This is where a copy of your deed will come in very handy. If you’re not really sure how to understand your deed, that’s something that we can take a look at and examine for you too.
We’ll go into more detail about legal access and why this is so important but I did want to quickly answer this question that somebody had asked about with regards to legal access – why that’s important and what that means. If you’ve got vacant land that you’re interested in selling, if you’re not sure whether you have legal access or not, feel free to give us a call. It’s not going to hurt for us to take a look at it and just let you know yes, we can buy it, or no, we can’t. But give us a call, shoot us an email, or fill out our form on our website. We’re happy to take a look at that property and get you quote. We always close through local area title companies so that you are protected through the transaction, so that the paperwork is done correctly. In this manner we will know for sure whether you’ve got legal access or not, but again, reach out to us. We look forward to hearing back from you. Thanks again.