access road issue

11 years ago

Hello.
We are almost ready to put in an offer on a rural house, so I looked at the access by gravel private road from the main road. There are no recorded easements, but there is a private gravel road.

On the ground, there is a gravel road across the mother parcel (the parcel with the house built in 1900), with a steep edge on the west. It is wooded drop off ten to twenty feet down at 45 degrees? It is eroding. That road moves east every time they dump gravel.

On the maps, our parcel has ten-foot wide strip that looks to be a hair west of the gravel. Then the back neighbor owns a strip that is likely half of the gravel, then the mother parcel begins, and may carry some of the gravel. The gravel later crosses the strips to pass entirely on our land by the corner, then continues to the back neighbor and on to two more parcels.

There is no HOA recorded. There was some talk of $15 a month collected for road maintenance, but it seems to be an informal agreement that I cannot get hold of.

So as long as there is a road there, we would likely have the right to use it. But if the erosion pushes the road too far, things could get closer to lawsuit territory. My piece looks too narrow and steep for its own road.

Do I have liability for erosion issues with the road? Can I lose my right to use it if it has moved from its prior location?

Can I ask for a survey in my offer? Would you lower the offer by $20,000 over this issue? Any advice?

Thanks!

Comments (7)

c9pilot
11 years ago
Definitely get a contingency with a survey that YOU pay for yourself - YOUR survey - and ensure that survey markers are placed so that you can walk around and see it yourself (you may not want to bug the surveyor when s/he is working).
Make sure you have all the recorded easements that will apply to you (you may have easement to cross other properties and they to cross yours).
And, the difficult part, talk to the neighbors about the informal agreement and find out who makes the arrangements and how the finances are accounted for. They should have something in writing, even if it's an informal email, just to give something to hold on to.

I've owned rural property where the dirt road ran along one edge bordering all the properties. The last person on the road had to travel along everybody else's, so everybody needed to maintain theirs in cooperation, so we all pitched in to have it graded about every 2 years and snowplowed during the winter. I believe it was divided evenly although some thought it should be pro-rated depending on how far back you were - how much of the road you used.
The other weird thing was that there was some sort of easement that the neighboring ranch could herd their cattle down the road, and back up the road, each year. So we paid for someone to spray down the road before they came to tamp down the dust they would raise.

Some good friends live on a private paved road and they complain about the person at the end who runs a business out of their home, which means big trucks are driving down the road multiple times a day. They don't think they should have to pay as much for repaving since one house is causing most of the damage.

Just some things to think about when sharing private roads!
User
11 years ago
An eroding road with an uncertain maintenance agreement and no other good options to write into the contract as an easement for future access should this one become unusable is a BIG BIG problem. No amount of money off can make up for this. If that road erodes away during a thunderstorm, then you have zero way of getting to your property and no legal right to do anything about it. You want to be able to negotiate an easement with an adjacent property for a second choice access. That means paying them some money for the privilege. And if that's not possible, then this isn't a home that anyone needs to buy until such time as a formal agreement for maintaining the road is come to by all of the interested parties and an account and trustee set up to collect dues and administer the needed repairs.
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LOTO
11 years ago
Loan underwriters will many times require a recorded shared road agreement as a condition of your loan...even if they don't you need to make it a contingency on your offer for the seller to provide this.
brickeyee
11 years ago
A lender would be crazy to use a place with no clearly defined access to public roads as collateral.
Pipersville_Carol
11 years ago
Make your offer contingent on a survey (that you pay for) showing acceptable access. And go down to the township building to talk to them about the possibility of putting in your own access road.
lyvia
Original Author
11 years ago
update - we finally got a plat - yay! there are permanent easements for road access. Now for the road maintenance...
TBD
Thanks for all your help!
brickeyee
11 years ago
You may well have to provide maintenance on your easement out of your pocket.

Easements often just provide access over property.

The owner cannot block, inhibit, or prohibit the access (no gates (unless you agree) or permanent structures that block the access).

They do not have to take any steps to provide or maintain the access.