FWIW, a friend of mine was in a similar situation - not identical, because she had the easement but wanted full ownership of her driveway.
She identified a section of her property that she didn’t have much use for, but that was adjacent to the neighbors property and potentially useful to them, and swapped that tract of land for her driveway.
That seems really smart. Maybe shave off a north/south strip of land with up to double the square footage of the piece you want for your easement, and trade?
Useful pic - thanks. Who owns the land to the N of both of you?
Sorry I have nothing to add to what of dubious use I have posted before.
I’m not sure you’ve ever clearly stated - is your desire for this property right to build yourself, or to maximize resale value for resale?
OH.
Thank you for the drawing: that helps a lot.
I wonder if it might be cheaper, in the end, to buy a larger portion than the strip outright?
I still think that a request (from you personally, not a scary lawyer letter) to the landowner would be best.
The request should be for an easement for a driveway - many folks are more comfortable with this rather than a purchase of a portion of land, and it can actually be (legally) much easier and less costly.
Make it clear that this is an easement ONLY, and will only be used to access your land. You will pay for all legal costs of the easement. You will take care of maintenance of the access road on the easement. You will absolve the landowner of any liability related to the easement. You might even offer to put in a locked gate from the county road to prevent unauthorized access to the easement, and give the landowner a duplicate key. You might indicated that your presence there acts as another set of watchful eyes on his property. You could mention good community relations. Make it look like a very positive thing for him to grant you the easement.
That impresses me as a reasonable approach. The other owner might agree to that at a reasonable price. If that fails, I don’t see why it would negatively impact SC’s option of pursuing the prescriptive easement.
When thinking about how to get this easement, it might be good to think about how you would want to be approached yourself. Imagine that one of the other property owners has been cutting across your property for 18+ years and now wants to make that an official easement. You would probably feel differently about it depending on how you found out and how reasonable to negotiation the other owner was.
Yes. Convince the other landowner that an easement would cost him nothing, while giving him benefits in return. In my experience, some folks are willing to simply grant an easement if it is in a more remote area of their larger property, while others may need you to “sweeten the deal” with some cash in addition to you covering the legal and other costs.
The key is to make sure there are no apparent downsides for the other landowner, and potential upsides. Having them retain ownership of the land is a positive for them, I think. All they are doing is allowing you to travel over their land.
Just to add:
If I got an official letter for a lawyer about an easement, it might arouse a bit of suspicion in me. I know this is not fair, but it would just make me think “hmmm. What are they up to here, and why so formal?”
If I got a letter from a lawyer with the word “demand” in it, this would up the ante. I understand that a demand letter is one that demands the other person (or corporation) performs a legal obligation.
To this, I might respond in my mind “screw you, I have no legal obligation to grant you an easement”, and then go find some large concrete barriers to put on MY LAND right where you want the easement. And basically think “your move buddy”
That seems like the consensus here. If someone approaches me like a decent human being, I’ll bend over backwards to be a good neighbor. If someone is trying to screw me or the first contact is a lawyer, the next thing I do is install a fence and cameras.
The term here is easement by necessity. If I own a plot of land, and I sell you part of it in such a manner that the only way to get to that land is to cross my land, then under the doctrine of easement of necessity, courts can imply a right of way into the conveyance even if not explicitly negotiated and included. Many jurisdictions include such a rule either by statute or as part of the common law.
If I’m selling you the land, sure, i may need to include a way to get to it. That’s different from saying “this land exists, the easiest way to get to it is to cross your property, so you need to let me do that.”
Was his plot ever part of his neighbor’s plot? Why is there a burden on his neighbor?
There’s not a burden on the neighbor whose property is the easiest way to get to his property. There is a burden on the neighbor who owns the property with the already existing easement , the one that needs a 4x4. And SC’s property was very likely a part of that plot at some point in history.
An easement implied by necessity will require common ownership of the two plots, but that can go back a long time. Imagine one plot being divided by an owner in, say, the 19th century, and one of them being inaccessible save via the other. In such a case, it’s not unlikely that a court would read an implied easement into the conveyance, and even if the two plots are subsequently owned by different series of new owners through the years, that original easement created way back might still exist in favour of the owner of one plot to the burden of the owner of another. Land law is an area of law where things that happened a long time ago might still have an impact today.
But as @doreen says, his plot does have a legal easement, it’s just inconvenient, and would need to be improved to allow automobile access.
So it seems awfully unlikely that his neighbor with the convenient access would have any legal obligation based on
It’s interesting that you might be able to go back through land ownership in some other case and create an easement that wasn’t granted at the time the property was originally sold. But i doubt it applies to this situation.
That is one of the differences here. his is not an easement by necessity, but rather a prescriptive easement under adverse possession.
Do you mean “this” rather than “his”?
Yes. My keyboard ucks.
As long as I live, I will never understand (or agree with) adverse possession.
Carry on.
Me either.
It’s adverse to the neighbors land. If it were me my back would be up in two minutes after I read that demand letter.
It would be costly to try to get my land that way. And take a long long time.