And having a lawyer or notary go over every line of the sale contract to ensure that you understand it. Real property comes with real responsibility, far beyond that of the financial realm.
Just accept that the property which you buy is provided with agreements granted to neighbours, and that by buying the property, you inherit the duty to said neighbours.
And then, don't fill a lawsuit to put people out of their homes in order to void these duties.
It's not just private companies you have to worry about doing this.
After you buy a property my local government sends you an mandatory looking survey in an attempt to a) rat on the previous owner for un-permitted improvements b) build a case for valuing your house higher for taxes c) preemptively admit to non-compliance with city specific laws you probably don't know about yet.
I was going to write a letter to the local newspaper but I thought better of drawing attention to myself that way.
Easements are a form of encumbrance upon a title. Though real estate law varies by state in the US, access easements are typically the only form of easement established by use...i.e. Passage across the property for physical access to another property. Any other easement must typically be recorded.
Recording an easement requires paperwork at the courthouse, doc stamps, and approval of any lien holders (such as a mortgager). The reason is that the lien holder has a secured interest in the property secured by the title - that they have joint ownership is the easiest way to think about it.
But rest assured, that if you build a fence on your neighbors side of the line its his fence. You can have a contract that gives you the right to access it and prohibits your neighbor from demolishing it, but it's with your neighbor as an individual. If they sell the property the new owner owns the fence and is not bound by the contract.
I wonder if there's buyer-side liability. If you purchase a property which then incurs vast costs due to a technicality in the deeds (example would be a duty to maintain something), who pays?
I figure that property owners are public record already, and those plans are already on the public real estate website, so I feel I’m not technically revealing more than what can already be discovered. Maybe I’m wrong though!
Surely, before consider expropriation, we should tell people who owns a property so that they can offer to buy it. If that's too much a privacy concern, the government could simply relay the offer.
I was just going to say this. You can get the blueprints for any home in any city just by requesting it from the local city hall records department.
You typically have to pay for it, but it is not particularly expensive. It's part of the process if you plan on buying a property, in order to ensure everything is up to code, property lines are where you expect them to be, etc.
Unexpected easements can be a real bitch if you buy a property only to find out part of it isn't actually yours, or that it is technically infeasible to update or rebuild a portion because of an undocumented/illegal code variance.
For me, the tangible benefit is in actually knowing where my land is. I have some things I want to do on it, and I'd rather find out before starting, rather than in the middle of building.
In the US, real estate sellers have to disclose known problems, but they can claim they didn't know, and then you might have to fight it out in court. It's still in your interest to get an inspection before closing.
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