All About Easements

Do easements make you anxious?

If you take nothing else from this post, take this: the existence of an easement is not a defect. Most residential properties have them. Most owners live with them without ever thinking about them.

Your goal as a buyer is not to locate a property without any easements. easements. It is to understand which easements actually affect day-to-day living (and how).

What an Easement Actually Is

An easement is a recorded legal right that allows someone other than the property owner to use a specific portion of the land for a defined purpose.

Easements do not transfer ownership. They do not give a neighbor carte blanche. They do not mean someone can do whatever they want on your property.

They mean that, for a narrow reason spelled out in a recorded document, someone else has the right to use a particular area in a particular way.

Why Easements Are So Common

Modern residential life depends on shared infrastructure. Water lines cross parcels. Sewer laterals run under side yards. Power and communication lines follow logical corridors that do not always respect lot lines.

In older neighborhoods, access patterns evolved before modern subdivision standards existed. Driveways were shared. Roads were private. Paths became permanent through use.

Rather than treating these realities as flaws, the legal system recorded them.

That is what you are seeing on your title report.

On the Monterey Peninsula, where many neighborhoods predate current planning frameworks, easements are often long-established solutions to practical constraints.

The Most Common Types of Easements Buyers See

Not all easements are created equal. Understanding the category often tells you most of what you need to know.

Utility Easements

These are the most common and the least consequential for daily living.

Utility easements allow water, sewer, power, gas, and communication infrastructure to run across private land. They are usually located along property lines or in areas that were planned for that purpose.

In most cases, they do not affect how you use the property. You mow over them. You plant around them. You forget they exist.

The limitation is simple: you cannot build permanent structures over them that would prevent access if maintenance is required.

For most buyers, that is not a lifestyle issue.

Access Easements

Access easements deserve your closer attention.

These grant someone the right to cross part of your property to reach their own. Common examples include shared driveways, private roads, or paths that serve multiple homes.

The presence of an access easement does not mean constant traffic. Often it formalizes a pattern that already exists and functions smoothly.

What matters is understanding who uses it, how often, and whether the physical reality matches the recorded description.

Drainage Easements

Drainage easements exist to manage water flow across properties. They are particularly common in areas with slopes, seasonal runoff, or engineered drainage systems.

They typically restrict building in specific areas, but rarely affect daily enjoyment of the property.

Coastal and Conservation Easements

In certain locations, easements exist to preserve access, views, or environmental features.

They can influence what can be built or altered, but they are usually well documented and make sense within the local context.

When Easements Matter More Than Buyers Expect

An easement deserves closer scrutiny when it affects how you plan to use the property.

Examples include:

• A driveway easement that limits where you can park or fence
• An access easement that passes close to living spaces
• A wide utility easement that constrains future additions
• A recorded right that allows future expansion of use

The mistake we see buyers make is assuming the presence of an easement automatically changes how the property functions. Often, the opposite is true. The property functions as it does because the easement exists.

Easements and Value

Buyers often ask whether easements hurt property value.

Utility easements rarely affect value. Shared access easements that are common in a neighborhood are often fully priced into comparable sales. Conservation easements can enhance value by protecting surroundings.

Negative value impact tends to show up when an easement is unusual for the area or interferes with a buyer’s specific plans.

Reading Easements in a Title Report

In a preliminary title report, easements appear as exceptions, often referencing recorded documents by number and date.

The report itself does not explain them. It points to where the explanation lives.

This is where interpretation matters. Not every recorded easement needs to be pulled and read in full. Many are standardized and well understood.

The goal is not exhaustive document review. The goal is identifying the few items that might intersect with your intended use.

What Easements Do Not Do

It is just as important to be clear about what easements do not do.

They do not allow unrestricted access.
They do not erase your ownership rights.
They do not permit arbitrary changes.
They do not usually introduce new behavior.

They formalize existing rights. They constrain in specific, predictable ways.

Most of the fear around easements comes from imagining them as open-ended. They are not.

Unrecorded Use vs Recorded Rights

One of the subtler points buyers miss is the difference between recorded easements and unrecorded use.

A recorded easement is visible in the title report. It is defined. It is insurable.

An unrecorded use, such as a neighbor informally crossing land for years, may not appear in title at all. That does not make it an easement, but it can create future disputes.

This is one reason recorded easements are often preferable to ambiguity. They replace assumption with clarity.

Easements and Title Insurance

Title insurance generally covers losses arising from undisclosed or improperly recorded easements.

It does not remove known, recorded easements. It ensures that they were properly disclosed and legally valid.

Why Easements Feel Scarier Than They Are

Part of the fear around easements is psychological.

Buying a home often carries an unspoken expectation of absolute control. Easements subtly challenge that idea.

In reality, property ownership has always existed within a web of shared rights and obligations. Easements simply make that web visible.

Practical Questions to Ask

Rather than asking, “Is this easement bad,” better questions include:

• Where is it located on the property?
• Who benefits from it?
• How often is it used?
• Does it limit anything I plan to do?
• Is this typical for the neighborhood?

Those answers tend to be concrete and reassuring.

Coming Up Next

In our next post, we will explore why “clean title” is often misunderstood, and how a property can have perfectly marketable title while still carrying meaningful constraints.

For now, the takeaway is simple: almost every property has easements, and almost none are worth losing sleep over.