Private access to real estate

Title issues

In this video, the speakers discuss the issue of private access to properties, which often arises in real estate transactions. This can be complicated when parcels are split between multiple family members, and there is no documentation in the chain of title to determine who owns what, who pays for what, and who is responsible for maintaining the private road or driveway. Lenders may require a road maintenance agreement, which can be a challenge to obtain if multiple parties are involved. The speakers emphasize the importance of having these conversations early and getting ahead of the issue, as it can take weeks to resolve.

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Video Transcript

The ever-important topic, how do I get to my property if it is private access?

Right? There's a lot of confusion on this issue because you have parcels that are split a lot of times. It's family members. Then things get sold off and nothing's ever documented in the chain of title to say who owns what, who pays for what, who's responsible for what.

Right, because we have a road that everybody's getting over to but we don't know how they're getting there. It's a driveway. It's a shared road but the county isn't plowing it; the county isn't maintaining it. So, how are we going to deal with who's going to pay for that? Because you've got the guy at the end of the road and you have the guy at the beginning of the road, and they're going to have different ideas as to who pays for what and when you're talking about. A couple people sharing a short driveway is usually pretty easy to come up with a solution. But a lot of times we see these private roads serving multiple cottages at one time and how do you get all those people to agree on how things are going to get repaired and replaced and the things like that.

It's an issue for the owners, certainly the buyer has to tee up, but also the lender is going to want to know as they take this property in for collateral that I understand who is paying for what and what rights are there because if they have to foreclose on that, they're stepping into the shoes of potentially that liability.

Right? So you get a lender who might out of out of an abundance of caution they're going to want to see a road maintenance agreement.

Yeah, they're going to want to see an agreement between all the owners as to who's going to pay for that. You run into issues where these people have been sharing this road for 20 years and they've never had to write down the agreement and now this lender for one property owners going to require a private road maintenance agreement. How am I going to get all these people to sign before the closing?

Yeah, and that's what you run into. It's a timing issue. This is one of those again where getting ahead of this having the conversation early. This is going to take likely weeks not days to resolve.