First, ascertain what YOUR wishes are. Then seek a local attorney to see whether your wishes are enforceable and - if so - how. Put some thought into whether you care about someone walking along the easement, construction traffic, regular traffic of all manner of vehicles in and out…
I won’t try to offer any opinion based on my vague recollection of a property law class 40 years ago. That cite above looks as tho the new owners will be able to “force” an easement upon one of their neighbors. As a VERY GENERAL principle, the law generaly prefers not to allow property to remain undevelopable. So - yeah. Someone somehow sold off portions of their land such that this new section is undevelopable. But it would not at all surprise me if whatever applicable body routinely imposed the burden on neighbors - essentially forcing an easement upon them.
Just curious - how large are these properties? How rural? How far from your home would this easment be?
My personal inclination is to suspect that the granting of this easement - and the development of the property behind me - would substantially decrease my quiet enjoyment of my property - as well as potentially affect the resale value. But someone else might not care, and might welcom whatever token payment granting of an easement would bring.
Given this is deer season (or near enough depending on where you are), is the property out of the way and of a decent size?
If a road gets put in that doesn’t exist and the property is a little out of the way, there are plenty of people who would use any such road for a variety of purposes, like hunting, or illegal dumping, or growing/making illicit substances, or trespassing for some other reason.
I’m no longer out in the sticks, but I’ve got friends (in Arkansas even) who have to deal with that stuff sometimes. Definitely get some professional advice.
Arkansas is not a Public Lands state. Sections mean nothing. Land can be divided by a will, and yes, landlocked parcels can result.
Not every piece of land belings to a lot in a subdivision.
I echo the suggestions above: see a real estate attorney (not a “generic” attorney that handles drunk drivers, custody cases, and family trusts). A real estate attorney knows all about deeds, wills, bequeathing, easements, cloud on a title, and other fun stuff. Easements should never be gated, who will maintain the driveability of the road, and who does the yelling if it gets flooded?
Your monetary compensation should at least cover the attorney fees and County filing fees.
“Subdivision” in New York State as a legal term means just that a piece of land that was legally one lot is being divided into two or more lots. I don’t know what the definitions are elsewhere; but here if you carve a five acre lot out of a larger piece, yes it’s a subdivision.
That really doesn’t make sense to me at all - if I was buying part of someone else’s property with no road access, I would have gotten the easement from the seller before the sale rather than trying to get one from a neighbor afterwards.
But in a way, that’s analogous to saying that you wouldn’t buy the used junker car until all of its flaws were corrected.
The fact that this lot had no access probably resulted in a very attractive purchase price. The buyer is presumably betting that they can get an easement and – all in – still have a relative bargain – quite possibly, one that they can then sell for a handsome profit.
They are betting and they might lose the bet. Some people (and I know plenty of them) would insist on being paid so much for the easement that it would be no bargain at all. And although I do not know the law in Arkansas, I can’t imagine that the OP would be forced to provide the easement rather than the property owner of the land that this piece was separated from. If anyone has to rescue her from the problem she created at all.
It’s really nothing more or less than real estate speculation. Very common.
And if you’re interested in more info about the applicable law, it’s here:
It doesn’t appear to limit the ‘target’ of this kind of action to the person who subdivided the land in the first place:
When the lands, dwelling house, or plantation of any owner is so situated as to render it necessary to have a road from such lands, dwelling house, or plantation to any public road or navigable watercourse over the lands of any other person and the other person refuses to allow that owner the road, the owner may petition the county court to appoint viewers to lay off the road, provided the owner gives written notice to the person twenty (20) days before application to the court and attaches the written notice to the petition.
State laws may vary; from what I understand in some states, a landowner can’t be denied access to the land (i.e. there has to be an easement), but the landowner can absolutely charge for that access as well as (I think) have some say in where that easement is located.
Four.
I only share twenty feet with her. If she went the long way, along my West and Southern boundaries, it would give me easy access to my property on the other side of the creek, but I think her best bet is to use the law mentioned above and come in one of the properties that share more border with her.
This might not work in your case, but I’ve heard one solution is to do a land swap. Some of your land gets added to her lot for her road and you get some of her land added to your lot. That way there’s no ongoing issue about an easement across your property.
I live in Iowa so what I have experienced may or may not apply to you.
I own some rural property (farm ground/pasture/woods) with a creek running through it. On the opposite side of my property is a parcel of property that overlooks the creek. Ideal location to build a house but it the access easement through the neighbor’s property is for "agricultural or land maintenance use only. Due to this easement restriction, no dwelling can be built as the zoning would need to be changed from agricultural to agricultural w/dwelling, which can’t be done due to the access easement restriction. Apparently it has been challenged, but upheld as access has not been denied, just the type of access.
My own experience with access easement is with a shared driveway to one of my fields. The acreage was split off many years ago and a few years ago the new owner surveyed the acreage and found that the property line is the edge of the driveway, not the middle, as we had thought. I was told by him I could not use the driveway. A quick call to my lawyer, then to his lawyer, explained that I have a “presumptive” type easement. Even though no formal easement was ever recorded, the fact that I (my family) had been using this driveaway for over 50 years gave us the right to continue to use it.
The OP needs to figure out if their land was ever used, formal agreement or not, to access this property on a regular basis. If yes, you may need to continue to grant access, but could challenge the reason for the access as a driveway (daily use), instead of infrequent use for property maintenance. If your property has never been used as a “normal” access point it is up to you to grant an easement or not.
If I was the OP I would not grant an easement, if you do, you lose control over what is happening to, and who is on your property where the easement is located. If you do grant an easement make sure all the "i"s are dotted and "t"s crossed as far as who is responsible for maintenance, use limitations, etc… Maybe charge a set fee to cover taxes as you still own the property.
If the part of the property wanted for an easement is of little use to the OP, then sell it off for a decent price and have the buyer cover the costs of the legal fees, surveying, courthouse costs, etc…Then the problem of who is responsible for what is taken care of.
So she’s hoping that one of the four asks the least amount for the easement, though she has to balance that with the cost of building the driveway across that. It may be that the party asking the most offers the least expensive access to the property.
Yes, if you’ve gotten an easement, whether from the seller or a neighbor, as part of the sale, then (presuming it was otherwise a legal lot) it would be a legal lot here also. Again, I don’t know what the laws are there – but, as you say, that’s what anybody with any sense ought to do in any case. And for a real estate agent it wouldn’t just be ignorance; which is why I suspect there’s some sort of scam going on.
I wonder whether that applies to new and recent subdivisions, or only to old landlocked parcels created when there were no regulations on the subject. It seems odd to me for someone to be allowed to demand an easement to get to a lot that they deliberately created as a land-locked lot, and to damage someone else’s property and damage someone else’s right to use their property to do so, even if (as it says) they’re supposed to pay for the damage and the loss of use. If the landlocked lot was created many years ago, I can see an argument that the neighbors ought to have known that this might happen; but that language taken by itself seems to mean that it could happen to anyone who bought adjacent to a parcel big enough to make a second lot out of (which, depending on the zoning or lack of, might in effect be any lot at all.)
And if this does apply to any lot at all, I don’t see what’s stopping this supposed real estate agent from buying up landlocked bits of hundreds of people’s back fields or even back yards and shaking down the neighbors to either pay for them or grant easements so they can be resold at a considerable profit. An unpleasant sort of business, but if it applies to any lot at all it seems it would be legal.
I can’t seem to negotiate to whatever other areas in that law might apply to creating new landlocked lots – when I try to back up further, I wind up with a list of stuff none of which seems applicable at all.
I should possibly note here that I sit on a town planning board and one of the things that we do is hear subdivision applications; which need to get through us before they can be filed with the county; which needs to happen before the lot(s) can legally be sold. But even in New York the exact regulations and process will vary from municipality to municipality, though some of the requirements are state wide; and I don’t think any of them are nationwide. For all I know Arkansas doesn’t even authorize any limitations on subdivisions in the state; and even presuming that the state allows municipalities to do so they may not require municipalities to do so; and the details of anything that does exist may vary locally.
That might (or might not, I’m not a lawyer let alone an Arkansas lawyer) settle the question of a court forced easement – you wouldn’t be denying them access, you’d just be making them pay for it. And they would have to pay you for a court forced easement, also, as well as pay associated costs. So the court might decide not to get involved.
Of course, if you don’t want to sell at any remotely plausible price, that’s not a good solution.
This “landlocked” parcel of property must have had some form of access in the past, either with a formal easement or not. As I asked earlier to the OP, is the property currently accessed through yours? If not, I would guess the “court ordered” easement would go through where the traditional access point was, which I have heard/seen in the past, is not necessarily the most convenient access point.
As it was part of a larger parcel, any access to it would have been through the rest of that parcel. And there wouldn’t necessarily have been any road access to that portion of the larger parcel at all. Many properties have no road access to their back fields or woods or their back yards – if they want to go there they walk, or maybe take an ATV or tractor or horse.
There are definitely not roads or car-usable driveways or even tractor lanes to every acre of land on the planet. Even in generally settled areas.
My sister lives in a very densely settled part of suburbia. The lot behind her home has no access. The deed is also a mess, i forget the details, but she once tried to buy it and gave up. One of the other abutters has been slowly encroaching on the property, and who knows, maybe they will ultimately own must of it due to adverse possession.
But random bits of land with no access are definitely a thing, and sometimes they’ve been that way for a long time.