Not looking for legal advice, just a question…
Let’s say that the neighbor’s property has 10 owners, each in equal 1/10 ownership. I know that any one of them could give you permission to enter and you would not be a trespasser.
But could any one of those grant an easement to a neighbor to use a portion of the property? Would the other 9 have any recourse?
Ha! Crap. I have a property final on Thursday and your question is leaving me scratching my head.
I eagerly await an answer as well. although my guess is that one owner would not be able to grant an easement that would limited access of the other 9 owners of the property in any way. Which would be most easements I can think of.
I had mine today. 
But it wasn’t one of the questions, but property is still on the brain.
But, to be fair, an easement doesn’t restrict the other 9. It just lets the neighbor use the property just like the other 9. A perpetual license, if you will.
pssst, what did you get for number one? Actually, why aren’t you in a bar and why aren’t I studying?
Thinking about this a little more. An easement is an interest in the property and lowers the value of the property by some amount. I can’t imagine this being permissible without consent from the co-tenants.
Maybe you could say that by law, the value is taken out of the one guy’s portion upon sale of the property, but what if the value dropped by more than the guy’s share? Just seems too complicated to be allowed by law.
To grant an easement over the property, all of the owners must sign the grant for it to be a valid easement.
A multi owner property is already going to have a process in place for determining who can make legal decisions for the property. that power may rest with a managing partner or a committee but if they have 3 firing brain cells betweeen them, there is already an agreement on this. If an individual partner who lacked such authority signed a contract it would most likely not be valid.
If its something big enough for 10 owners it would not shock me to hear it was held by a corporation and there will be an officer of record who would sign off on such things with the agreement of the other owners.
IANAL but I am a CEO of a tiny corp.
Nah, just assume that Grandad owned it, and his 10 grandkids now have equal shares.
And if you’re a municipality or government agency and can only get signatures from 9 of the 10, you have to go into full-blown condemnation.
I know of one case where a developer was required by the City to install a drainage basin to serve his 9 lot development. Each of the lots were therefore assigned a 1/9 ownership of the drainage basin and a 1/9 responsibility for keeping weeds abated. That way he could be done with the properties when they were all sold.
Caltrans widened the freeway next to the basin and took a small sliver off of it. Well, off of the land surrounding the basin, the basin itself was untouched. The lots had changed hands since being originally sold, some of them more than once. None of the current owners knew that they owned a share of the basin.
I forget if it was two or three of them that wouldn’t sign to sell a sliver of a piece of property that they hadn’t even known they sort of owned. Could have been that they didn’t want to sign a piece of paper acknowledging they owned the basin because they didn’t want to be stuck with the weed abatement, which they hadn’t been doing. Could be they didn’t want to sign anything important without running it by a lawyer and didn’t think it was worth paying a lawyer for a possible $2,000 payout. Who knows.
It took five years to get it fully condemned, although the paperwork that allowed the construction to go ahead came through much more quickly. And at the end, the ones who wouldn’t sign still wouldn’t sign to pick up their checks. Their portions ended up reverting back to the purchasing account. Go figure.
No, actually it is quite common for property to be owned by several “tenants-in-common”. Ten is a bit high, but not outrageous, particularly if, as mentioned above, a group of relatives has inherited the property.
When you have a tenancy-in-common, all co-tenants must sign any instrument affecting the property as a whole (as opposed to an instrument conveying an individuals in-common interest to another person). As such, to grant an easement, all ten co-tenants must sign the easement grant with all necessary formalitys (notarization, etc.) for the document to be recorded.
The municipality would have to condemn only the 1/10th interest it was unable to get a deed from.
Real property law is extremely local, so there are probably at least 50 answers to this question (if we’re talking US only).
I would want to differ here. An easement differs from mere right of entry precisely in that the grantor commits himself to refrain from such behaviors as would unduly harm grantee’s use of his easement. Or am I misunderstanding?
Real property held by more than one person/entity can be titled in several different ways. The rights avalable to each owner separately depend greatly on which method the property is titled under.
So all answers will depend on the OP specifying which ownership arrangement is in use.
I had precisely this situation several years ago. Property had been handed down in the family for a few generations. I had a 1/2 share and my several cousins split the other half.
Courts regard property as being non-fungible. Cash for example can easily be divided since no individual $20 note is worth more than any other (generally speaking). A piece of property held in common (or jointly) is therefore indivisible for the purposes of a court ordered division of the property. In a situation where the co-tenants can’t agree, a court will order the sale of the property and split the proceeds.
A logical extension of that is that no one co-tenant can say this is my 1/10th and I will grant you an easement. All owners have to agree since it represents a permanent encumbrance.
Commercial properties are most likely handled in a completely different way. I would guess the land is generally owned by a corporation or trust and the incorp or trust documents specify who can make decisions and what procedures must be followed.
Many owners (tenants-in-common) are quite possible when property has not been conveyed for many years and generations have gone by without the property being devised to specific devisees. I’ve seen land with scores of owners, each owning an undivided interest in the property. Sometimes computing the percentage of the interest each owns can take a while. Many times some of the owners cannot be found. The suit you describe is called a partition suit, although the property itself is not partitioned. A quiet title suit can also be filed. The owners who cannot be located can be served by publication only.