You can own the lot and still not own the way in. Easements and access before you buy land.

Every few months somebody calls me about a piece of land in Baldwin County that’s priced well under everything around it. Nice trees, decent size, a few minutes off the highway. The listing says the road is right there.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes the road is right there and the parcel doesn’t actually touch it, or it touches it across a ditch the county owns, or the gravel drive everybody uses to get back there runs across a neighbor’s land on nothing but a handshake. That’s usually the reason for the price.

Access is the least exciting question you can ask about land. It’s also one of the few that can make a parcel close to worthless, so it goes first.

Touching a road is not the same as having access

There are really three different situations, and they look alike from the truck.

Frontage on a public road. The parcel itself borders a county or city road. This is the clean version. You’ll still need a driveway permit and a culvert where the ditch requires one, but the right to get in is yours.

Access by recorded easement. The parcel sits behind someone else’s land, and there’s a written, recorded easement giving you the right to cross a strip of it. This can be perfectly fine. It depends entirely on what the easement says.

Access by habit. People have always driven back there. The old owner and the neighbor got along. Nobody wrote anything down. This is the one that bites, because the neighbor who sold you on it isn’t the one who owns the land in five years.

What a recorded easement actually gives you

An easement is a right to use someone else’s land for a specific purpose. It isn’t ownership of the strip, and it’s only as good as its wording. Before you rely on one, read it, or have your closing attorney read it to you. You’re looking for a few things.

Who it benefits. A good access easement runs with the land, meaning it belongs to whoever owns your parcel, not just the person it was originally written for.

How wide it is and what it allows. A twelve-foot path written for “ingress and egress” in 1970 may not clearly cover a power line, a water line, or a concrete truck. If utilities have to come in the same way you do, the easement needs to say so, or you need a separate one.

Where it goes. A description that says “the existing drive” is weaker than one tied to a survey. Drives move. Surveys don’t.

Who maintains it. Shared private roads need a maintenance agreement, written down, saying who pays for gravel, culverts and grading after a wet summer. Without one, every washout becomes a negotiation with your neighbors.

If there’s no access at all

Alabama does have a legal path for a landlocked owner to ask a court for a right-of-way across neighboring land to a public road. It exists for a reason, and it’s narrow. It’s a lawsuit, you pay the neighbor for what you take, the width is limited, and the courts have long said that inconvenience alone isn’t enough when another reasonable way out already exists.

So it’s a remedy, not a plan. If you have to go to court to reach your house, you’ve bought a lawsuit with a lot attached. Price it that way or walk away.

Easements running through your land

The other half of this is easements that cross the parcel you’re buying. Utility lines, drainage, a neighbor’s driveway, a pipeline. These ride along with the land when you buy it, and you can’t build on top of most of them.

That matters more than people expect on smaller lots. A drainage easement down one side and a power easement across the back can shrink a buildable acre into a much smaller homesite, and they can decide exactly where the house, the septic field and the driveway have to go. Get them drawn on a survey before you fall in love with a spot under the oaks.

How to check it before you write an offer

• Ask for the survey. If there isn’t a recent one, plan to order one. Ask the surveyor to show access to a public road and every recorded easement.
• Pull the deed and the plat. Baldwin County land records are public. A recorded subdivision plat usually shows roads, lot lines and platted easements.
• Read the title commitment, especially the exceptions. Before closing, the title company lists what its policy won’t cover. Easements show up there. Ask about any you don’t understand.
• Ask the planning office before you buy. If the only way in is a private easement, call the county or city planning and permitting office and ask whether they’ll issue a building permit on that lot as it sits. Get the answer before the deposit goes hard.
• Make access a condition. Write the contract so that confirmed legal access to a public road is a condition of closing. If it isn’t there, you get your money back.

None of this is legal advice, and on anything unusual your closing attorney is the right person to read the documents. But the questions are simple, and asking them early costs nothing.

Cheap land is sometimes a great deal. Just make sure the low price is about the land, not about the fact that nobody can legally drive to it.

If you’re looking at a parcel and want a second set of eyes on the way in, call or text me at (251) 597-5809. No pressure, just honest numbers. I answer my phone.