By Michael M. McMahon
You just bought your dream house on acreage and start to settle in. On your first weekend, you go out to enjoy a cup of coffee in your beautiful backyard. Halfway through your coffee, your neighbor strolls through your picturesque yard. You try to forget about it by hopping in your car to run some weekend errands. As you drive down the private road leading to the highway, you see a utility employee trenching on your property. On Monday, you talk to your attorney, only to find that both the backyard trespasser and the unauthorized driver have an easement to use your property – one for access and one for utilities.
An easement is a legal right to use someone else’s property for a specific purpose without owning it outright. Ownership remains with the property holder, but the easement grants a limited property interest and rights to another party. Though they do not transfer ownership, easements do limit how the property owners can use their own land.
By example, an electric company may have an easement to install and maintain power lines across private land. The company does not own the land but has the right to access it for those installation, maintenance, and repair purposes. Easements are everywhere: driveways, sidewalks, pipelines, and even scenic views can involve easements. They are the often invisible threads that connect private property to public use and may be visible only on the documents granting the easement rights.
Easements serve practical purposes that may often benefit the owners of adjacent or nearby properties. The type we see most frequently, especially in litigation, is the access easement, which grants rights to use the “burdened” property for ingress and egress for adjacent property. Some easements grant utility companies and their contractors rights to run water, sewer, electricity, or telecommunication lines. They can serve the general public by allowing access across private property to reach places of public interest such as beaches and lakes.
Without easements, efficiently delivering necessary services like electricity, water, internet would be impossible.
California recognizes numerous easement types, with six being the most common easements and coming with unique implications. These include:
• Affirmative Easements: Allow someone to do something on another’s land, with the right being granted in a legal document recorded with a county recorded to “put the world on notice” of the easement’s presence.
• Negative Easements: Such easements prevent the landowner from doing certain things such as blocking sunlight to a neighbor’s solar panels.
• Utility Easements: Grants utility companies rights to install and maintain infrastructure.
- Easements Appurtenant: Attach to the land itself, benefiting one property (the “dominant estate”) while burdening another (the “servient estate”).
• Easements in Gross: Benefit a person or company rather than a property (i.e., a railroad company’s right-of-way).
• Prescriptive Easements: Acquired through long-term, open, and continuous use of another’s property that is without permission and hostile to the property owner’s property rights.
Each type of easement balances private rights with broader community or individual needs. Buying property with an easement can be both beneficial and burdensome. The presence of an easement is not inherently bad. Some, such as utility easements, are essential for functioning neighborhoods. But easements do come with implications.
Significantly, easements limit owners’ control of land they legally own. The owner of the burdened property must allow the easement holder to use the land burdened by the easement, which limits where the property owner may legally build, landscape, install fences, among other things. The extent of the restriction, such as the ability to exclude others, depends on the easement’s language in the case of a written easement.
Easements can also affect property value and cannot be terminated, absent an agreement of the parties or a court order or judgment.
The positive impacts include guaranteed road access for a landlocked parcel, utilities more easily available, ability to use shared facilities and, most importantly, legal certainty.
Understanding easements is critical when buying property. They can affect value, privacy, recreational use, and development potential. But they also allow landlocked neighbors to reach properties, ensure that homes have critical services, and that communities thrive. Fortunately, most easements are shown in documents reviewed in connection with ensuring title in connection with purchases. In many cases, a buyer may want to contact an easement attorney to guide you through the process.
Easements encourage communities to grow and thrive by allowing limited rights of use of property. Some may view them as traps hidden in fine print, but they are legal tools that keep communities functioning.
Michael McMahon is a Partner in Carmel & Naccasha’s Litigation Practice with a focus on business, real estate, employment, and public agency litigation, in addition to insurance defense and corporate and business transactions. Mike can be reached at (805) 226-4148 or mmcmahon@carnaclaw.com.
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