Showing posts with label easements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label easements. Show all posts

Friday, June 12, 2020

Social Justice Real Estate


I try my best on this blog to focus on the issues effecting the real estate market and offer a perspective uninfluenced by political factors. To the extent that social factors effect the real estate market, I am happy to address them, but I work diligently to ensure that this blog does not serve the dual purpose of promoting any particular political ideology. With that said, we are all contextual creatures and I, as an African-American male, cannot ignore the current outcry regarding police brutality against my fellow brothers and sisters.

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Easements

Easements are a common occurrence in real estate, but what are they really?

Essentially, an easement is the right to use a property granted by the owner of the property to a non-owner or class of non-owners. An easement is by no means the only way for a property owner to confer use to a non-owner, but unlike other forms used to grant usage rights, such as licenses and permits, easements are recorded against the title of the property over which they are granted and remain in effect despite the transfer of the land. The ability of an easement to survive the transfer of title is called “running with the land.”

Easements differ from leases, which also confer the usage rights of a property to non-owners and also run with the land, in that easements exist in perpetuity, whereas leases have a term with a termination date. As a result, in order to terminate or “extinguish” an easement, an affirmative action must be taken like merger or abandonment. A lease, however, automatically terminates upon the end of its term, without any further action by the parties to it.

There are different types of easements and easements are generally categorized in different ways. The first way that an easement can be categorized is based on to whom or what the rights of usage are granted. If the easement grants rights of usage to the owner or occupant of another property, it is called an easement appurtenant. In this instance, the property on which the easement is established is called the servient estate and the property that receives the right of usage is called the dominant estate.