Posted on 05/19/2016 3:13:02 PM PDT by freedomjusticeruleoflaw
Help please. I have done research and I'm stymied. Simple question for the forum... Can I replace a fence that is on my property, which is covered by an ingress/egress easement, if the fence will in no way impede the intended use of the easement? The fence has been in place for 15 years, needs replacement, neighbor is objecting. I have been getting two answers from the interwebs.
Yes as I told him he simply needs to call either the closing attorney who closed the sale or the title company who issued title and they will tell him what the legality is and be glad to inform his neighbor as well. This is very common not complicated stuff. There is zero need to spend money dragging a new attorney into this. Ingress/egress easements are clearly spelled out in the title papers and/or warranty deed and run with the property.
DON’T HIRE an attorney!
Instead do it yourself: spend some time and effort to really screw things up, so you can spend $10,000 to have an attorney untangle your self-created mess and do it right; which he could have done from the start for a $1,000 or less.
sarc/ button now off!
The nature and terms of the easement matter. Do you have the legal document on which the easement is founded? Or is the easement implied as necessary for the sake of the neighbor?
When you hire an attorney, first thing they ask for is documentation. That means deeds, bill of sale, Banks if any still holding mortgages. etc. You just don’t walk into the Lawyers office.
That reminded me of something that happened to me a few years ago. There was an empty field behind my and a few neighbors houses. For years, builders were trying to put in an apartment complex ( which would include section 8 housing ). Our neighborhood consisted of houses in the $200-300 K range. We always defeated them at the planning commission due to the amount of traffic that would be increased onto the road.
Well, one day my neighbor came to me and said he had a call from an attorney ( the attorney never once contacted me - I was the one who led the opposition previously ) who said that our houses were actually built on part of his clients land and his client was willing to cede that land to us if we were to not challenge the construction. I told my neighbor that was BS and even if it were true, we had been living there for 20 years and not once was there ever an objection, so we would own that land by adverse possession. Anyway, I went down to the county clerks office and pulled up their filing. Their filing showed the property line going through the middle of my house. I looked at the measurements and immediately saw what they did. I had a copy made and went home. The survey stakes were still in the ground from the previous survey. Now it just happened that every measurement on the initial survey consisted of the numbers 1, 0, 6, and 9. These idiots for the new construction never made a survey ( which by law they had to do and they had certified to the city that they did ). All they did was go into the old survey and made a copy of the measurements. The problem was that they had the page upside down , so for instance a measurement that said 901 looked like 106. Sure enough, when I measured with the "upside down numbers", it showed the property line going through the middle of my house. Now this lawyer had never lost an application through the planning commission. When they had the hearing a few weeks later, he made his presentation, all confident and smug - smiling at me when he was done - sure that it would be approved. I got up, showed his "survey" and then the initial survey and explained what they did (with pictures of me with a measuring tape showing where the "new" lines from the inverted reading matched their filing). Also, to twist the knife further in, I pointed out that the property line was also the line between the county and the town ( the property was in the county, but they wanted to tap into the towns water line, so they needed the approval of the town ). So by claiming that the property line was actually 20 feet into the town, the county - if effect- was trying to steal town land. That didn't sit well with the planning commission. They immediately denied the application. The look on the lawyers face was priceless - both when I first showed how they faked the survey and then when his application was denied.
So, the moral of the story. Never trust what an attorney tells you. Always check it out yourself.
A few of us may have stayed at a Holiday Inn last night, but that won’t serve as well as local legal counsel....
Thank you
That’s a great story. Ronald Reagan said it best: “Trust but verify”
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