That’s a pretty picture isn’t it? Green grass….blue skies….trees….and an electric pole. While this picture is full of greenery, I must tell you, we aren’t just looking at a pretty picture. We’re looking at the easement to our property; it’s blocked. And that’s a problem….
If you were to look at our land on the survey, you’d see that there is a twenty foot easement with that electric pole that runs between two houses straight back to our property. What that survey doesn’t show you are all of the trees. Now, this didn’t come as a surprise to us. We visited the property numerous times before deciding to buy. So, this isn’t a “griping” post. No, I want to talk to you about the importance of both easements and road frontage.
When buying property, if financing through a bank, one of the main things they are going to look for is do you have access to your property. There is a lot of cheap land for sale out there and some of it is what you would consider to be “land locked” meaning, there is no access to it at all – it is surrounded on all sides by others’ property. This decreases the value of that land tremendously and a bank would not look favorably upon it. What’s the use of having property if you can’t get to it? And the banks are wondering what’s the use of having land if they can’t sell it if you should happen to foreclose? In these situations, you will have to convince someone to give up some of their property to give you access to yours. And depending on who that neighbor is, and what that land is used for, that might be a hard thing to do.
Having road frontage and easements takes care of those questions. Road frontage is just that – access to your property from the road. Just about every house has this access. And, from what I gather, the bigger the property, the more road frontage you’d want for various access points. For us, the area of the land that we want to build on is not on the road, hence we need an easement. And we have one. It’s not usable for vehicles, but we have one. If you remember, in the blog, “Title Insurance – TAKE IT!” the previous land owner’s family owned a bunch of land in the immediate area. Well, they sold a lot of it and one of the pieces they sold belongs to our neighbor whose land is attached to the easement. At his time of purchase, the previous land owner had no plans to sell the property we have now, so our neighbor planted trees and shrubs so that he would be able to tell where his property ended and his neighbor’s beside him began. In doing so, he encroached on the easement. Now we could have been real jerks about this and made a big deal about his encroachment but, we wanted to be neighborly and not make enemies before we even moved out there. Fast forward to this week. We got to finally talk with him and he was very kind and accommodating. I’m actually looking forward to speaking with him and his wife again sometime. But together we decided we have to figure out how to either save the trees or cut them out if we want to get access to the back of our land. Or we can use the road frontage that is attached to the front part of our property and create a drive way to access the future home. See? There’s always more than one way to skin a cat.
Antoine had to go out and meet the utility engineer regarding the pole on Monday. While there, he did a quick video for you showing you what the easement looks like now. I think that after talking it over we’ve decided to leave the easement as-is. No sense of uprooting all of those trees and paying the utility company $5,000-$6,000 to move the pole when we have another way to access the property. Anyway, here you go…enjoy!
Edit Note: Speaking of easements. Here is some information I wasn’t aware of. I just ran across this and I wanted to pass along to you. Remember, laws may vary where you are. But it’s good info to keep in mind: http://www.nc-eminent-domain.com/eminent-domain-issues/easement-issues/