Guide To Real Estate Easements
Almost every piece of real property serviced by a utility includes an easement held by the company or municipality that first installed access to the utility. So upon reviewing a title report, the question invariably arises: What is an easement?
I’ll quickly do the lawyer thing and provide the legal definition of an easement, which is “an interest in land owned by another person, consisting in the right to use or control the land, or an area above or below it, for a specific limited purpose.”
Maybe a better way to explain the definition is by example.
Let’s say you’re buying a house in Somers, New York. You’re in contract and The Donaldson Law Firm just emailed you a copy of the title report. You’re looking through the exceptions listed in Schedule B and read the following:
Easement in: Liber 227 cp 165.
If this is your first time buying a house, you might think, “What in the world does that mean? What’s ‘liber?’”
Very good questions but, further along in the title report, you come across what look like copies of really old legal documents. One of them has “L227 cp 165” handwritten across the top of the page and below that it reads:
RIGHT OF WAY: New York State Electric & Gas Corporation. The undersigned, hereinafter called GRANTOR, being the owner of or having an interest in land situate in the Town of XYZ, County of Dutchess, State of New York . . . hereby grants and releases unto the New York State Electric & Gas Corporation . . . the right, privilege and authority to construct, maintain, and remove a pole line with the necessary wires . . . used for the transmission and/or distribution of electric current upon said property.”
So what is an easement? If the home has electricity provided by a power company, then that power company recorded an easement on the property with the permission of whomever owned the property at that time and that easement allows the power company to install and maintain the power lines that provide electricity to the home. And that is the sole purpose for which the power company can access your property.
That’s one type of easement of which there are many, including right of way easements (where two properties share the same driveway), light-and-air easements, etc.
Again, though, almost all homes that are serviced by a utility or sewer system will have at least one, if not several, easements recorded against the property, most of which likely happened decades ago in the first half of the twentieth century as towns were building their infrastructures.
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