What is an Easement - Everything You Need to Know! - With Junge Ma

What is an easement? You may have heard people talk about property easements. Do you know what they are and how to find them? This episode, we're going to unpack what you need to know about easements as an investor and where you can find the critical info about them. My name is Junge Ma, the lead research analyst at InvestorKit.

Now let's get into it. So what is an easement? An easement is a legal right to occupy or use another person's land for specific purposes. The use of the land is limited and the original owner retains the legal title of the land. By having an easement on your land, some implications may include a restriction on the use of the land or how the property can be used and developed, depending on the type of the easement, of course.

Now I'm going to introduce to you four commonly seen easements. The first type is called easement for services. That could be the most common type of easement. These are for such things like electricity, gas, water, telephone lines, etc. If an easement is registered on the land, it is usually in a particular area, for example, at the back of your yard.

In that area, the authority will be allowed access to your land for purposes like installing, maintaining, repairing electricity, gas, water, telephone lines, etc. And one thing important to remember is that although the authority has access to your land and perhaps dig your land, in the end, after all the work is done, they have to make good any damage it has caused and restore the land to the condition it was prior to their access. The second type of easement that is commonly seen is right of way or right of carriageway. This type of easement happens when a lot of land is landlocked, surrounded by all other lots, if they don't have this easement, so they need to borrow a driveway from one of the other lots so that they can get access to the road. And the third type of easement is easement for access and maintenance.

This is more commonly seen in newer subdivisions where the land size is a lot smaller than the average block. This is to make sure that every property can have access down to the end of that lot for maintenance and repair purposes. And this means that on one side of the lot, the building can be built close to the fence, but on the other side, there has to be space for access to the end of your yard. And the fourth commonly seen easement is called easement for support. If a building relies on the wall of a neighboring house for structural support, the neighboring property would most likely have an easement for support.

This is very commonly seen in urban areas where houses or terraces are built close together. So in summary, the four most commonly seen easements are easements for services, right of way, easements for access and maintenance, and easements for support. Now when easements should be a concern, there are two scenarios. First, if there is a non-compliant building, especially when it is a major dwelling or a major structure on top of the easement or in the restricted area, that would be a problem. And the second scenario is that when you plan to subdivide the lot and develop in the future, but the existence of this easement will make that very inconvenient or even impossible.

In that case, this easement could be a deal killer. But outside of these two scenarios, easements are just common and should be fine. Now in the end, how do we find out about the easement and where do we find the critical info about them? First, the easiest way I would say is to do a title search on your property or your target property. If you have the sales contract, there should always be a title search included in the contract.

But if you don't have the sales contract, what you can do is to go to your state's land registry or title registry office website and do this title search. It's not free, but it's not expensive. For example, in New South Wales, it should be around $16 and in Queensland, it should be $24 something, but it's not a big amount of money. The offices or the websites in the major states include in New South Wales, it is Land Registry Services and in Victoria, it is called Land Use Victoria. In Queensland, it is called Queensland Title Office.

In Western Australia, it's called Landgate. Then in South Australia, it's called Land Services. And for the smaller states and territories, in Tasmania, we have Tasmanian Land Titles Office. In Canberra, we have Access Canberra. And in Northern Territory, we have Land Titles Office.

We're going to include all these links in the show notes below. And a second way where you can find out about your easement is to go to council websites or planning portals in some states. I'll use Rockhampton Council as an example to show you on the screen. So in Rockhampton, they have an interactive mapping portal. If we just Google Rockhampton Interactive Mapping Portal, it will come up in the top results.

Here in my screen, it should be the first. Click here to visit the map. To search for your property, we go to Address Search. I'll be using this property as an example. Chain and the suburb is Gracemere.

And let's search it. Okay, cool. So now this is that lot. As we can see, there is an area at the back of its yard circled in red lines. That should be its easement.

If there is layers of lots of maps here, while we want to see easement, we would like to go the administrative group and tick easement. As you can see, easement is already ticked here. And that's the area within that red box. But the thing is, on council interactive maps, you can tell the type of this easement. From how it looks, I would say it's in relation to rainwater drainage, but I'm not 100% sure.

If you would like to find out more detailed information about this easement, later I will introduce to you a very useful website. So the next way where you can find about easement is through paid portals. For example, RPData or Archistar. Here I'm going to use RPData as an example. I'm at the homepage of RPData now, and I will be using the same street as an example.

Chain, Resent, and Gracemere. Search. For example, number five. We see this map on the top right side. And then if we click on map layers, scroll down, there is easement.

We tick the box and we'll see the pink lines as their easement. Again, in RPData, they also don't show the actual type of this easement. You just can know there is easement there, but won't know exactly what that is. So to find out, actually one very useful website is called Before You Dig. And its website is the yda.

com. au. And here is its homepage. What you need to do is just to sign up. And then once you have signed in, there is a button called Lodge an Inquiry.

So now essentially we are pretending to do some digging work on your property and the website and the team will find out for you what easements are there and what the restrictions will be. And to lodge your inquiry, they have this video guide and you can just simply follow this through and put your inquiry in. Here I have an example, a downloaded report from this inquiry. It looks like this containing lots of pages. What we want to see is one page with the plan map and the easements.

We're searching for this lot and we can see this blue line at the back of its yard. That blue line here we can know it's a drainage pipe and it is underground. So in summary, in this episode, we've got to know what easement is, the four typical types of easements we usually see, easements for services, right of way, easements for access and maintenance, and easement for support. And then easement will be a problem only if one, there is a non-compliant building on top of it or in the restricted area, or if you would like to subdivide and the easement will cause trouble to subdivide this lot. Otherwise, easements are just common and won't be a concern.

And then we've learned where to find it, including title searches, planning portals, paid portals like RPData, and finally the beforeyoudigaustralia. com website. I hope you find this episode helpful. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and we'll do our best to reply to every one of them. I'm Junge Ma, the senior research analyst here at InvestorKit.

Thank you for your time and I'll see you next week.