Easements are the legal document that gives me the right to cross one property to get to my property but that can present some issues when we're trying to close a transaction and there may or may not be an easement in place.
But yet we're seeing that people are crossing.
Well, there's multiple types of easements. There's easements for access. There's utility easements. There can be a multitude but you're exactly right. We have to make sure that there's an easement in place so that you have direct access…you have legal access that's granted to go in and out of it in and out of that partial.
Right? And the problem with easements is they can be very generally described where it just says I get to cross a property or it may be very specific. It's these 30 feet along this side of the property and if that's not particularly described or it doesn't describe the use of that easement it can be very challenging. We've seen it before where we've got a property that's behind another property that someone's going to buy to develop it's vacant right now, but it's going to have five houses in the future. Well if I'm the guy that the property in front that has that easement crossing my property, I might have to force you to put the brakes on because when I granted that easement, I only anticipated maybe one house back there. Now you want to put five so all those types of issues when it comes to easements, especially private easements with neighbors; things like that. We all see utilities easements. Consumers Power has their cable through there. You know, DTE Energy has their gas line. Those easements aren't as big a concern sometimes in rural areas.
Yeah that they're not as big the concern there as it drives setbacks for construction.
Right? So if you're looking for a buildable envelope and you have an identified all of the easements, you could have a power company that has one of those high tension lines and they could have an easement 250 feet on either side or even more. It really closes the buildable envelope or restriction if you're not aware of those easements.
Exactly, and you talked about overburdening and that's a big legal issue that is because if I think I'm going to be able to build five houses and now I can only build one, that property is going to be worth something different.
