r/tinyhomes • u/Effective-Note9686 • 2h ago
The road being there doesn’t mean you’re allowed to use it.
A road can run right up to the property line and you can still have no recorded right to drive on it.
Physical access means a road exists. Legal access means something recorded says you may use it. Those don’t always come together.
What I’d actually check:
Whether the easement is recorded, or just something the seller describes on the phone. Recorded means it’s in county records with a book and page you can pull up yourself.
Whether it runs all the way to your parcel or stops at a neighbor’s line and leaves a gap.
Whether anyone along it is allowed to gate it, and whether that’s written down anywhere.
Who’s obligated to maintain it. An easement nobody has to maintain is a road that eventually stops being one.
A county-maintained road touching the parcel is the clean version. Everything else is worth reading before you wire money.
One tell: if a title company won’t insure access, that’s them telling you about something they already looked into.
Disclosure since it comes up: I do land due diligence for a living, so I have a commercial interest in people caring about this. I use AI to help me write these up. The records and statutes I pull and verify myself, that part is the job. Happy to answer access questions in the comments.