You close on a 3 acre property outside of town. The plan is a workshop in the back, maybe a guest cottage down the road. Six months in, you stake out the workshop, get the slab poured, and the utility company sends a letter. Their easement runs straight through the corner of your foundation. They want it moved. The fine print on page 14 of your title commitment said exactly that, but nobody flagged it because it didn't show up on the satellite image and didn't show up on the survey you decided not to pay for.
This is how easements ruin otherwise good investments. Not at closing, but six months or six years later, when you finally try to do the thing you bought the property for.
We see this pattern across every property type. Raw land buyers find a recorded ingress easement letting a neighbor cross their parcel forever. Multifamily developers discover a drainage easement that eats half a buildable lot. Commercial owners learn the back of their loading dock sits inside a utility corridor the power company can come dig up whenever they want. Different properties, same problem. Someone else has a legal right to use part of what you just bought, and most buyers don't read the documents that would tell them.
What an easement actually is
An easement is a recorded right for someone other than the owner to use a specific portion of a property for a specific purpose. The owner still owns the land. The easement holder has a legal interest in it. Easements run with the land, not with the owner, which means when you buy the property you inherit every easement attached to it. They almost never disappear at closing.
The "specific purpose" part matters more than people realize. A utility easement is not a vague permission to do whatever utilities do. It is a defined right (run lines, maintain them, access them) over a defined area. The same is true for every other easement type. The exact language in the recorded document tells you what the holder can do and where they can do it. If you have not read that language, you do not actually know what you bought.
The five easement types you'll actually encounter
Utility easements exist on almost every developed parcel and most undeveloped ones. Power, gas, water, sewer, telecom, all of them carry easement rights. They typically run along property lines or across them in straight corridors. Widths vary by utility and era, often 10 to 30 feet for residential service lines, much wider for transmission corridors. If you are planning to build, the easement usually means no permanent structures inside the corridor, no foundations, often no fences without permission. The utility's right to access trumps your landscaping plans every time.
Ingress and egress easements (also called access easements) give someone else the right to cross your property to reach theirs. Common in rural areas where a landlocked parcel uses a driveway across a neighbor's land. Also common in commercial settings where a shared driveway serves multiple lots. The easement might be 20 feet wide, 50 feet wide, or whatever the original document specified. You cannot block it. You usually cannot gate it without consent. You typically share maintenance costs with the user, but the original easement language controls.
Drainage easements let water flow across or pool on a defined area of your property. Most buyers miss these because they do not show up on Google Earth. They show up on the recorded plat or in the easement document itself. A drainage easement can prevent you from filling, regrading, paving, or building on the affected area. For developers, this is the one that quietly turns a 5 acre site into a 3.5 acre buildable site, and it usually does not get flagged until the civil engineer pulls the recorded plat for the first time.
Prescriptive easements are the ones that scare people, because they are created by use, not by paperwork. If a neighbor has been using a path across your property continuously and openly for the period your state requires (typically 10 to 20 years), they may have legal rights to keep using it even though nothing is recorded anywhere. These do not show up in title searches because they are not recorded yet. They show up when you try to fence the path and the neighbor takes you to court.
Conservation easements voluntarily restrict what the property can be used for in exchange for tax benefits, usually granted to a land trust or government entity. These are permanent and they significantly limit development. People sometimes buy properties with conservation easements in place without understanding that the building or subdivision they planned is no longer legal, regardless of what zoning allows.
How to actually check for easements before closing
Easement detection is not one step. It is three.
Step one: read the title commitment carefully. Every title commitment lists exceptions in Schedule B. Easements are exceptions. They will be referenced by document number, recording date, and book and page. Most buyers skim Schedule B because the language is dense and the exceptions look generic. They are not generic. Each one points to a specific recorded document. You can request that document from the title company or pull it directly from the county recorder. Read it. If you do not understand it, your real estate attorney does.
Step two: get a survey, even when it is not required. A boundary survey runs roughly 800 to 2,500 dollars depending on parcel size and complexity. It is one of the cheapest forms of insurance you can buy in real estate. The surveyor will plot recorded easements on the drawing, and a good one will flag unrecorded conditions worth investigating: a worn path, a power pole in an unexpected spot, an outbuilding that crosses a line. Lenders often waive surveys for refinances and even some purchases. That does not mean you should skip one.
Step three: walk the property and look for evidence of use. Tire tracks, footpaths, utility markers, drainage swales, fence lines that do not match the parcel boundaries. Anything that suggests someone is using the property or running infrastructure across it. If you see it, ask about it. The seller may not know the answer either, but the question itself creates a paper trail and protects you in disclosure.
The dollar cost of getting this wrong
The financial damage from a missed easement varies wildly. Sometimes it is annoying but livable. Sometimes it is catastrophic.
A utility easement running through the area you wanted to develop can cost you the entire planned use. Relocating an underground line, when the utility will allow it at all, typically runs 50,000 to 200,000 dollars. Many utilities will not allow relocation under any terms. A drainage easement on a development site can reduce buildable area by 15 to 40 percent, which directly hits your project pro forma. An undiscovered ingress easement means a permanent loss of privacy and an unwanted ongoing relationship with whoever holds the right to use it.
For investors flipping properties, the cost compounds when you go to sell. The next buyer's title commitment will surface every easement, and if you did not know about them, their agent is about to. Disclosed problems get negotiated. Undisclosed problems become lawsuits.
The check we'd run on every deal
Before you write an offer, pull the parcel on the county GIS and check for visible utility corridors, access points, and obvious infrastructure crossing the property. In your purchase agreement, make the title commitment review a contingency. Read every Schedule B exception. Pull the underlying documents on anything that sounds substantive. Get a survey before closing. If anything on the title commitment does not match what is on the survey, stop and ask why before you sign.
Easements are not always dealbreakers. Many properties carry easements that do not affect your intended use at all. The point is not to avoid every property with one. The point is to know exactly what is there before you commit, so you can price it into your offer, plan around it, or walk away with your earnest money intact.
Quick checklist
Before closing on any property, confirm:
- You have read every Schedule B exception on the title commitment
- You have pulled the recorded document for any easement that sounds substantive
- You have a current boundary survey and you have compared it to the title commitment
- You have walked the property and asked about every visible sign of use
- Every easement you are inheriting fits the use you bought the property for
