Q&A: What access issues?
When you start looking for a parcel of land, one of the areas you need to investigate fully has to do with access. Are there challenges associated with physical and legal access? Are they resolvable? Should you purchase that particular parcel of land? The answers all depend on the specific parcel of land you are considering purchasing.
Specifically, there are two different types of access issues that could exist with a parcel of land, especially a larger parcel outside of town. One pertains to physical access, and one to legal access.
Physical Access
The term physical access specifically refers to the actual road that is in place and must be transversed to reach a specific parcel of land. In Kalispell Montana, there are many roads that are not maintained by the county or town. Many of those roads also do not have any formal road maintenance agreement in place. Nor do there seem to be any specific requirements in terms of how wide or graded those roads should be.
What this means is that many of the roads, especially those that go into more remote areas, may be in need of repair. They might have deep ruts from years of melting snow and strong rainstorms. Or they may be rarely used and full of grass. If it’s wintertime, there might be a lot of unplowed snow, or sometimes even worse, icy roads that have been driven on many times. There might be potholes. In addition, there may be very sharp or steep areas that would make bringing in lumber trucks, concrete trucks or well drilling trucks very difficult if not impossible.
Further, in many areas, there might not be any agreement or document that requires any land or home owner to take care of the road. And quite frankly, many owners like a crappy road. It means less people will be driving by their land. So if you are considering buying the last parcel of land on a private, un-maintained road, that may mean you will need to have a sturdy truck and plow if you wish to get out in the winter. Anyone considering buying property like this would need to understand “it is what it is” and they should expect the road to remain as it is. Or perhaps get worse with time.
This is important for both buyers and sellers. Sellers may need to price their property lower to reflect the difficulty new owners will have in accessing and utilizing the land. And buyers will need to take into consideration any accommodations they will have to make for the road. Perhaps they will need a side-by-side or snowmobile to get up and down the road. Or maybe they’ll need to hunker down in the winter. Maybe they’ll need to spend some money in making road repairs themselves so that driving in and out is easier. Or perhaps they will have to build their own home using lumber already on the land. Bottom line, access to some properties can be physically challenging.
Legal Access
In addition to physical access issues, there could also be legal access challenges. For example, during a recent title search we found out a specific piece of land that had been in a family for decades was basically landlocked, even though a road went right to it. In fact, on this one road, there were seven parcels at the beginning of the road that had never provided any kind of easement for the road that had transversed their properties for years.
This kind of situation is mostly found in rural areas outside of town. In another situation, people purchased a parcel of land three decades ago and have not been to the property since. When they purchased it, there was physical access through two different parcels of land. In the thirty years since then, those private owners, who never signed an official easement, blocked off access to their property which blocked access to any other properties behind them. After thirty years, the land owners now want to sell their land but there isn’t any way to get to it. Not legally and now, not physically. Yikes!
There are several potential issues associated with having no legal access. First, if a buyer is interested in purchasing the land with a land mortgage, they will not be able to do so. Financial institutions will not fund property that does not have legal access. Second, if the new land owner wishes to build a home and need a construction loan to do so, again, they will not be able to obtain the money from a bank. And third, if a property owner “owns” the road going through their property (in other words, they never provided legal access to anyone else), they could block off the road. Anyone with land behind that road closure would be out of luck until the issue was somehow resolved.
There are resolutions to the issue of no legal access, but none of them are fast or simple. The first potential solution is to ask the private owners if they would agree to sign an easement. This is the simplest, least expensive and quickest way to move forward.
However there are many land and home owners in this area who don’t want to sign anything. They don’t really care what the document is for, they just aren’t interested. There are others who have been around forever and think they know the status of the road. In other words, they are sure it’s a county road, not a private road, and therefore they shouldn’t need to sign. And even if they receive proof that it is indeed a private road, they still object to the idea. Or a home owner might insist the road does not go through their property. And even if three different official maps are provided that indicate the road does indeed go through their property, they don’t believe it. And then there are some who just say yes and some who just say no.
So if home and land owners refuse to sign an easement, then a more official, costly, and legal route would be necessary. In this case, an attorney would need to draft documents that will pursue an Easement of Necessity, Prescription or Implication, depending upon which is the correct route to take. All of this takes time, and in the case of the attorney route, money. So if possible, making sure a parcel has legal access should be done prior to putting the home on the market.
Summary
Anyone who wants to sell property in Kalispell or anywhere in the Flathead Valley needs to investigate and resolve access issues as best they can prior to putting land on the market. And any buyer needs to make sure they know exactly what types of access issues might come along with that property and their use of it.
If you want to talk to a Kalispell real estate broker who focuses on land and can help with your access questions, call Kat at 406-270-3667!
Thank you for reading “What access issues?”
Information previously published in an earlier blog listed here.