Yeah I got that. My question stands I think.
Asked and answered. Edge.
I’d say it’s not “marginally” more convenient. It’s a “miles” long access via undeveloped hilly terrain vs. 90 yards of level ground. It’s the sort of change that would make the difference between a property being useful to develop and useless to develop.
As a person who has a parent that owns undeveloped property that hasn’t been visited in 20 years, prescriptive easements make me concerned. However, from a societal perspective, people who use and develop lands should not necessarily be hampered by absentee owners who don’t pay enough attention to their property to know if it’s being used or not. The reality is that it seems to be VERY difficult to get a prescriptive easement and make it stick, or at least it’s quite costly if the owner wants to fight.
So it seems like you have a good idea of the value of that shortcut to the county road to the person who owns your land (i.e. at the moment, you) - it’s $20K. And I’m guessing you could get by with a strip 90 yards long and 15 feet wide, assuming all one-way travel, which if my calculations are correct is a bit under a tenth of an acre. If you offer $10K and you pay all the costs of the transfer, will the owner go for it? And if they don’t, what would be the costs of fighting it? I’m guessing the latter would go much higher than $20K in the end.
If your lawyer thinks it’s a 100% plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face open-and-shut slam-dunk case, then go ahead and send the letter. But considering the effects on the landowner who suddenly gets a “letter of demand” out of the blue, you can expect a battle once they open that envelope…
So if there’s any doubt about it, if it were me, I’d make a generous offer for the access (I mean, $100K/acre!) and then let it go if the price goes too high. If the people buying from you consider also the effect that a nasty lawsuit could have on neighborly relations, you might not be able to sell the property for as much as you were wanting anyway.
If this strip is on the northern boundary of one property, is there a different property to the north of that? Could you use a strip along the southern part of the property to the north? If so, perhaps one owner would be more willing to sell than the other.
Is this what it looks like:
|
Property A |
-----------------------------|
Mrs. SC | |
Property | Property B |
| | <--- County RoadIANA Rural Landowner, but the problem seems to boil down to a simple one.The right-of-way would add $20,000 to the value of the property.
Options:
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Offer the owner $5K to buy the strip of land outright, and be prepared to go up to $10K for just the easement.
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Bring in a bulldozer, start clearing a strip from the county road to your property and see if someone stops you. If they don’t, then you have a real case for an easement.
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Use the bulldozer to clear the easement you already have and make a serviceable road out of it.
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Hire a lawyer, take it to court, spend several years trying to go through the system and risk facing a judge and jury who are friends with the owner.
If they do, they have a real case for trespassing and destruction of private property.
Well, sure, but it will cut through the red tape. 
Fair market value for the strip is $250. I get what you’re saying but we are not in position nor willing to pay $20K for it.
If that’s the case, there might be an obstacle to purchasing the land. If A ever wishes to sell to B, or B to A, to form a continuous property–or even if they think there is a tiny but non-zero probability of that happening–then they have an interest in not selling a small strip, or at least demanding much more than the fractional value of the land to cover the potential loss.
I’m also interested in the layout of the properties as @filmore tried to diagram. There can be big differences depending on configurations.
Fair market value for the strip that makes your property much more accessible is a lot more than fair market value for a random acre of land.
No disrespect to you @Saint_Cad , but any letter of demand I received on my property would get my dander up.
I don’t know how it is or the actual legalities out there, but here boundaries are taken personally. Fights and court battles happen all the time. Hunters, leased land, owned land, camp sites, even running deer dogs across a neighbors land is reason for grief.
I really really think a demand letter or court case would be the backwards way to do this.
Do you know this landowner? Can you speak to him first and feel them out?
Yeah. If buyers are cutting the offering price by $20K because there is no easement, then it sounds like the fair market value for the strip is $20K.
Why would I take that as disrespect. It’s the attorney’s idea not mine.
Can you please sketch out the properties? It would help all of understand what you are asking.
A lot of the descriptions so far are hard to interpret.
Ok. I’m confused here. I thought the lawyer you got didn’t give you advice you needed, perhaps by your wife not explaining it. But in the end the word was it was no good. Second lawyer you contacted wanted too much money to proceed.
Do you have another lawyer?
What second lawyer?
You said you called someone referred to you from work and it was way too pricey.
Imagine two squares next to each other west and east. Ours is the east one. County road runs north to south through the west one 90 yds from the east one. The strip we want is the north boundary of the west one between the road and the east lot.