Easements Explained for Washington Homebuyers

Somewhere in the middle of your escrow, a document called the title commitment will arrive with a section most buyers skip: Schedule B, the list of “exceptions.” On almost every Seattle-area property, that list includes at least one easement. Most are harmless. A few can quietly reshape what you can do with the lot you thought you were buying.

Here’s how to read them like someone who’s done this before.

What an easement actually is

An easement is a recorded right for someone who doesn’t own the property to use part of it for a specific purpose. The classic examples:

• Utility easements. The power company, water district, or sewer utility has the right to run lines across a strip of your land and come maintain them. Nearly universal; rarely a problem.
• Access easements. A neighbor has the right to drive across your property to reach theirs — common on flag lots, shared driveways, and older plats where one parcel is landlocked behind another.
• View easements. Less common, but they exist in some Seattle hillside neighborhoods: a recorded agreement limiting how tall structures or trees on one lot can be, to protect another lot’s view.

The key word is recorded. A properly recorded easement runs with the land — it binds you as the new owner whether or not anyone mentioned it at the open house. That’s exactly why the title commitment lists them.

Appurtenant vs. in gross (the two flavors)

You’ll sometimes see these terms in title documents, and they matter:

• An appurtenant easement connects two parcels: one benefits, one is burdened. A shared-driveway easement is appurtenant — it transfers automatically with both properties forever.
• An easement in gross benefits a person or entity rather than a neighboring parcel. Utility easements are the standard example: the benefit belongs to the utility company, not to any nearby lot.

Why care? Because an appurtenant easement means a neighbor has rights on your land — and neighbors, unlike utility crews, are there every day.

Walking through Schedule B: what’s routine, what’s not

When your commitment arrives, sit down with the easement exceptions and sort them into three buckets.

Bucket 1 — routine, ignore-able. Standard utility easements along the lot lines, typically a strip a few feet wide at the edge of the property. Almost every platted lot has them.

Bucket 2 — read carefully. Access easements, shared driveway agreements, shared well or drain-field agreements (more common outside the city), and anything involving a private road. These usually come with maintenance obligations — who plows, who repaves, who pays. Ask the title officer for the full recorded document, not just the one-line exception. It’s your right to request it, and the maintenance terms are where surprises live.

Bucket 3 — slow down and ask questions. Easements that cross the middle of the lot rather than the edge, easements with vague or missing legal descriptions, easements granting someone broad or undefined use, and any view or height restriction. A sewer easement running under the exact spot where you imagined a DADU can kill that plan — utilities generally won’t let you build over their lines.

The questions worth asking before you waive anything

1. Where is it, physically? An easement description in a 1962 document doesn’t always map intuitively onto the yard. If location matters to your plans, this is one of the situations where paying for a survey is cheap insurance.
2. Who maintains it, and what’s the cost history? For shared driveways and private roads, ask the sellers for any maintenance agreement and recent cost splits.
3. Does it block what I want to build? If you’re buying with an ADU, addition, or major landscaping in mind, overlay the easement on your plans before your contingency periods run out — especially on steep-slope lots, where buildable area is already tight.
4. Is it actually being used as described? A path the neighbors use daily that isn’t in the recorded easement — or a recorded easement nobody has used in decades — both deserve a conversation with the title officer and possibly an attorney. Unrecorded, long-standing use can ripen into legal rights in some circumstances, and that analysis is firmly attorney territory.

Can you get rid of an easement?

Sometimes, but don’t count on it as a buyer. Easements can be terminated by written agreement (the benefited party releases it, usually for money), can sometimes lapse through the terms of the original grant, and in disputed cases get resolved through a quiet title action. None of that is a quick pre-closing fix. The practical buyer move is to understand the easement before you remove contingencies and price the property accordingly — or walk.

The honest take

Easements aren’t deal-killers by default; nearly every house in the region has at least one and the owners never notice. The risk isn’t the easement itself — it’s finding out at closing time (or after) that someone has rights over the exact part of the lot your plans depended on. Read Schedule B, request the underlying documents for anything non-routine, and for anything ambiguous, get the title officer on the phone. If the answer affects your plans and still isn’t clear, a real estate attorney’s hour is some of the cheapest risk reduction in the whole transaction.

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