Buying and building
Easements, plainly explained
Somebody else has the right to use part of your land. Here is how that works and how to find out what you are dealing with.
An easement is a right for someone other than the owner to use a defined part of a property for a specific purpose. You still own the ground. They have a right to do a particular thing on it, and you cannot interfere with that.
The common types
Utility easement
The most common by far. A utility has the right to install and maintain lines across a strip of your property. Usually along the rear or side lot line, often shown on the recorded subdivision plat, typically somewhere between five and twenty feet wide.
Access or ingress and egress easement
A right to cross your land to reach another parcel. Extremely common on rural property where a back tract has no road frontage of its own. If your driveway serves a neighbor, or theirs serves you, there is probably an easement involved and it is worth knowing whether it is recorded.
Drainage easement
A right for water to be conveyed across your property, often along a ditch, swale or storm structure. Building in one or regrading it is how people create flooding problems for themselves and their neighbors.
Prescriptive easement
The awkward one. A right that can arise from long, open, continuous use without permission, rather than from a document. Requirements are specific and fact dependent, which makes this an attorney question rather than a website question.
How to find out what runs across your property
- Your recorded plat, if the property is in a subdivision. Utility and drainage easements are usually drawn on it.
- Your title commitment or policy. Recorded easements appear as exceptions, listed by document number. This is the most complete list you are likely to get.
- A survey. A boundary survey can show easements, and an ALTA survey plots every exception from the title commitment and shows exactly where each one lands.
A list of easements is not a map of easements. Your title commitment might name fourteen documents. Knowing which of those actually cross the ground you want to build on, and where, is the specific thing a survey answers.
What you can usually do on an easement
Ordinary surface use is generally fine. Lawn, garden, landscaping. It is still your land.
What tends to cause trouble
- Permanent structures: sheds, garages, additions, pools
- Large trees whose roots interfere with buried lines
- Fences that block access, though some easements tolerate a gate
- Regrading that changes how water moves through a drainage easement
- Anything that stops the holder getting equipment in
The consequence is worth understanding. If a utility needs access and your structure is in the way, they generally have the right to remove it, and you may bear the cost. That is not them being unreasonable, it is what the easement says.
Before you build anything
Find out where the easements are first. Not from memory, not from the neighbor, from the plat, the title work or a survey. Discovering an easement after the concrete is poured is a genuinely bad afternoon.