Imagine this:
Your neighbor approaches you because they need to connect to the city sewer and your property sits between theirs and the connection in the street. They approach you and offer you $10,000 for a 10’ easement on a part of the property you do not use to bury a sewage pipe to connect you to the street. Sounds like a sweet deal so you gladly accept without a second thought. Two years later, you find out that your property is large enough to subdivide and determine you meet all the requirements. Lots of similar size are selling for $110,000 in the area, there is only one problem, the easement runs right through the building site. Now this easement that you thought was a sweet deal has cost you $100,000 due to losing the ability to subdivide. All of this could have been avoided by hiring a licensed appraiser to do an easement appraisal.
An easement is the grant of a property interest that allows the holder permission to use another person’s land. Easements are nonpossessory meaning that you only have the right to use the land; easements are not ownership.
The easement appraisers at Lake State Realty have experience in appraising the following types of easements:
- Solar Easements (Right to Light)
- Avigation Easements
- Railroad Easements
- Utility Easements
- Drainage Easements
- Sanitary Sewer Easements
- Electrical Power Line Easements
- Telephone Line Easements
- Fuel Gas Pipe Easements
- Sidewalk Easements
- View Easements
- Driveway Easements (Access Easements)
- Beach Access Easements
- Dead End Easements
- Recreational Easements
- Conservation Easements
- Historic Preservation Easements
- Easements of Lateral and Adjacent Support
- Communications Easements
- Ingress/Egress Easements
- Water Easements
- Permanent and Temporary Easements
- Negative Easements
There are many reasons as to why you would want a valuation on an easement such as: a title company (in a rare instance) misses an easement during a title search, a property owner receives an offer proposing an access easement through their property, an encroachment is discovered, a government or public utility wants to acquire an easement, and many more. We do not recommend creating any easement on your property without getting a professional valuation, you could be losing out on countless thousands of dollars.