A Small Parcel With Heavy Systems On It

A car wash or a quick lube bay occupies very little ground and runs a surprising amount of infrastructure on it. Water comes in at volume, waste goes out under an agreement with somebody, the equipment is financed separately from the building, and the site is almost always reached across a neighbor's pavement.

Each of those is a recorded question or a filing question, and the deed answers only one of them.

Access Is the Site's Most Valuable Feature

These businesses live on convenience, which means they live on the entrance. Most of them sit on an outparcel carved out of a larger retail center, and the right to drive across the parking field to reach the bay comes from a reciprocal easement agreement rather than from the deed.

Comparison of a recorded reciprocal easement agreement, which fixes access points and binds the next owner, against an informal arrangement with the adjoining center, which ends whenever that owner changes — A drive aisle you use today proves nothing about a right to use it after the center sells.

Read that agreement before anything else. It will usually fix the access points, allocate maintenance cost, and sometimes restrict signage, stacking and hours. It may also carry a use restriction that bars a competing use, or bars yours. Our note on easement and right of way searches covers how these read, and commercial property searches covers the outparcel question.

Where the site fronts a highway, a recorded access control line or a state department of transportation agreement may limit where a curb cut can be, and that instrument outlives any striping on the ground.

Water In, Waste Out

A tunnel wash can use a great deal of water per vehicle even with reclaim, and the supply and discharge arrangements are frequently documented rather than assumed.

On a municipal system the discharge may run under an industrial pretreatment agreement, with monitoring and surcharges attached. On a private system there may be a recorded easement for a leach field, a well or a reclaim tank, sometimes on the neighbor's ground. Where the property draws from a well, water rights and well searches set out what is recorded and what sits with a state agency instead.

Quick lube bays add used oil, filters and antifreeze to the picture, plus an oil water separator and, on older sites, a service pit. Those are environmental and permit questions rather than title ones, and they are worth asking about in the same breath as the title work, the way a gas station or fuel site search treats them.

The Equipment Is Not the Building

Conveyors, blowers, brushes, reclaim systems, point of sale terminals, vacuum islands and the lube bay lifts are financed as equipment, and the lender perfects by filing a financing statement at the state level in a system the land records do not touch.

Comparison of car wash equipment treated as personal property and perfected by a financing statement filed at the state, against equipment affixed to the building and covered by a fixture filing recorded in the county land records — Which category an item falls into decides what the buyer is actually acquiring.

Some of it crosses over. Where a system is affixed to the structure, a lender may record a fixture filing in the county so the interest is good against a later buyer or lender, and those do appear in a parcel search. Our note on UCC fixture filings explains the mechanism.

The practical question is which category each item falls into, because a conveyor bolted to a slab may convey with the building or belong to a finance company, and the answer decides what is being bought.

Names, Entities and Recorded Leases

These businesses commonly separate the real estate company from the operating company, and liens land in different places as a result. Run both names, not one, as our note on LLC and trust owned property describes.

Where the operator leases the site, a recorded lease or memorandum of lease is part of what a buyer takes subject to, and the term and renewal options are frequently the most valuable thing on the parcel. Franchise agreements, by contrast, are private contracts and will not appear in the record at all.

What to Search Before You Buy

Search the parcel for the chain, the mortgage, every easement and reciprocal agreement, any recorded lease and the liens. Search back far enough to reach the instrument that created the outparcel, because that is usually where the access and the use restrictions were written.

The access and the use restrictions were usually written when the outparcel was carved out.

Then run a separate state level search for financing statements covering the equipment, and ask the seller for the discharge agreement, the water documentation and the permits.

What the Record Cannot Settle

A search reports what was recorded and found in the indexes reviewed over the term searched. It does not tell you whether a discharge agreement will transfer, whether a permit is current, what the equipment is worth, or which items are fixtures as a matter of law. Those are questions for counsel and for the agencies that hold the files.

What it does deliver is the recorded half, with copies attached. Compare our search products, or tell us what you are buying and we will say which search fits before anything is ordered.

Car Wash and Lube Searches