What Is an Easement in Real Estate?
What Is an Easement?
When there is an easement on a property, it means that another person, business, or government has the right to use that property for its own specific purpose. While they do not have ownership of the property, they do have certain legal rights to it.
While easements might sound problematic, in many cases, they are nothing to worry about. For example, if your property is behind another person’s property that you have to access to get to your own, the other property might have an easement that states you can use their land to get to your property.
There are several different types of easements that you might come across when looking to purchase land or property. Below, we define several types of easements that you might see.
Private Easement
A private easement is a type of property right that the property owner can create and sell to an outside party. Make sure that if you are looking into buying a property with a private easement that you understand what the terms of the easement are.
Utility Easement
Utility easements are not created by private owners, but instead by local or state law. Utility easements are in place when a piece of property has utility infrastructure on it that local or state employees need access to. Sometimes, this type of easement will prevent you from doing things to your property that will affect the utilities. This is also called an easement in gross.
Easement Appurtenant
With appurtenant easements, a dominant neighboring property gets access to another property as a servient property for a specific reason, such as access or amenities.
Easement by Prescription
A prescriptive easement gives property rights to people who don’t own the property because they have been using the property for a period of time without anyone doing anything about it. If a property was abandoned by a previous owner and someone took up residence in it illegally, it might be considered an easement by prescription.
Easement by Necessity
An easement by necessity is when someone else has to access your property for a particular reason. These can also be called access easements because another person will have access to your property.
There are many different types of easements that you might run into when looking to buy a property. Make sure that you ask your real estate agent about any easements before committing to purchase a piece of property.
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