Land Is Where Assumptions Get Expensive

A house on a platted subdivision lot is a well-documented thing. Its boundaries were surveyed recently, its address is unambiguous, and the road out front is a public street. Raw land is frequently none of those. It may be described by metes and bounds written a century ago, reached by a track that crosses someone else's property, and owned in a form where the rights below the surface left long before the seller acquired what is above it.

Raw land is described, reached and taxed differently from a subdivision lot, so the search looks at six things rather than the residential shortlist.

None of that makes land a bad purchase. It makes land a purchase where the recorded history matters more, not less, because there is no house, no HOA, and no recent transaction to have surfaced the problems for you.

Access Is a Recorded Right, Not a Road

This is the single most expensive assumption a land buyer makes. A visible driveway, a gravel road, or a gate the seller has a key to is not proof of a legal right to cross. A recorded easement is a written right of way that runs with the land and survives a sale of the neighboring parcel. A neighbor's goodwill does not.

Comparison of a recorded easement, which runs with the land and survives a sale, against a neighbor's informal permission, which can end when the neighbor sells — A driveway you can drive on today proves nothing about a legal right to use it tomorrow.

A parcel with no recorded access is landlocked on paper regardless of how easy it looks to drive onto. That affects what you can build, whether a lender will finance it, and what the land is worth when you sell. Where access does exist, the terms matter too: an easement may be limited to particular uses, restricted in width, or shared with maintenance obligations. Our guide to easement and right of way searches explains how those rights are recorded and what a search of them will not reach.

What May Have Been Severed Already

Surface ownership and subsurface ownership are separate estates, and in much of the country they were separated generations ago. A deed conveying the land may say nothing about whether the mineral rights come with it, simply because they departed in an earlier conveyance. The same is true of timber rights and, in some regions, water rights.

This matters practically rather than theoretically. A mineral estate holder may have rights of surface access to reach what they own, which can mean equipment on land you bought for a house. Our mineral rights searches trace those interests through the chain, and easement searches do the same for rights of way.

Descriptions Drift When Parcels Are Split

Acreage is routinely carved up over time. An original tract gets described once, pieces are sold off across decades, and each conveyance defines the new lot by exception from what came before. What is left is the remainder, and the last deed may describe it largely by what it is not.

How an original tract described once becomes a remainder parcel after pieces are sold off, with each conveyance carving out a new description by exception from what came before — The last deed on a remainder parcel may describe the land largely by what it is not.

The predictable results are overlaps, gaps, and exceptions referencing parcels that no longer exist under those names. Reading the conveyances in order is what surfaces them, which is why a chain of title search is often the right scope for land rather than a look at the current deed alone. Where the boundaries themselves are in question, that is survey work, and a surveyor rather than an abstractor is the right professional.

Taxes, Liens, and Assessments on Unimproved Land

Vacant parcels are easy to forget about, including by their owners. Unpaid taxes accumulate quietly, and because property taxes generally outrank private liens and follow the parcel, they become the new owner's problem. Special assessments for roads, drainage, or utility districts also attach to the land. A lien and assessment search reports what is recorded against the parcel, and the report shows tax status alongside it.

What to Order, and What a Search Will Not Answer

For most land purchases the useful combination is a chain of title deep enough to cover the splits, plus the lien and tax picture as of today. Compare the options on the title search products page, or request a custom quote for acreage that spans several parcels or counties.

Two honest limits. A title search documents what has been recorded and indexed in the offices searched, as of its date; it is not an inventory of everything that could affect the land, and recording practice varies from one county to the next. And zoning, permitting, wetland status, and buildability sit with county planning and environmental agencies rather than in the land records, so a clean title report does not tell you what you are allowed to build.

Have an address or a parcel number? Contact us and we will tell you what scope the property calls for. If the land came to you through an estate, our guide to inherited property title searches covers the heir and probate questions that come with it. Buying a parcel with a manufactured home already on it? How the home was titled changes the search, and our guide to manufactured and mobile home titles explains why. Where the acreage has since been platted and built out, our guide to new construction title searches covers the documents the development itself creates.

Buying working agricultural ground rather than raw land? Our guide to farm and ranch land title searches covers water rights, grazing leases and severed minerals.

Vacant Land & Acreage