Rather do 10 Small Deals or One Large One

Jack Butala: Rather do 10 Small Deals or One Large One. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening.

Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.

Jill DeWit: Hello.

Jack Butala: Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about would you rather do 10 small deals or one large one? Pretty simple question, and it's fun to talk about this. It changes different points of my career, different things. Before we get into it Jill, let's take a question posted by one of our members on landacademy.com, our online community, it's free.

Jill DeWit: Cool. Scott asks, "How should I go about getting easements from neighboring land owners? I have a really nice property that is land-locked. There's already a road in place, but it's for the power company, who appears to have easements in place with the two property owners that I need to get from them. Do you send the neighbors an offer to get them to sign an easement?"

Jack Butala: Hmm, that's a great question. It's like a masters degree level question.

Jill DeWit: It is. I'm very impressed.

Jack Butala: Here's the answer. Common sense applies here, and all situations are different. Step one, almost in all cases, is to make a phone call to planning and zoning in the county that the property's in, and ask this question. In some counties, it's incredibly easy. In Arizona, there's a statute that says no one can reasonably withhold access to your property. No adjoining property owner, land owner can reasonably withhold access.

What does that mean? What it means is, if the property's out in a rural area, and it's not your primary residence, you're going to be, depending on how seriously you want to take it from a litigation standpoint or lawsuit standpoint, you're going to give the person access, so you might as well just cause a ton of problems, reduce all the problems for yourself and everybody else and say, "Heck yes, I'll give you an easement on the right side of my property, and here it is." Plus, now you're getting better access to your property, so every place is different, that's my point.

Step one, talk to the planning and zoning person, and then step two is to send a letter or make a phone call to the adjoining property owners. Every single time I've done this and contacted the owners, they've said, "What do you mean? You bought that piece of property next to mine? How about you buy mine, because I don't want mine. What would you do? I'll take that. I'll take the price."

Jill DeWit: There's your access.

Jack Butala: Yes, exactly. Money solves this problem.

Jill DeWit: Money solves a lot of problems.

Jack Butala: It sure does. What are some problems that money doesn't solve Jill?

Jill DeWit: Oh my goodness. I have to think about that. Money does solve a lot of problems. That's so good. You're right. I love your, just use common sense and reach out to the people. Some of the questions that we have sometimes, they just don't know where to go first. You're right, if there's already an easement there, I find it hard to believe that there's an easement that only the power company's allowed to use, and nobody else.

Jack Butala: Yeah, I question that too. I don't actually know the answer to that, but I think that if it's a utility, I don't know.

Jill DeWit: They may have established the easement.

Jack Butala: You know what amazes me about this group Jill? These people look into this stuff way more than I would. I would just sell the property and say, "It looks like there's access. I haven't checked. I don't know exactly. Please do your own research before you buy this property from me buyer, but looks like there's access to me."

Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jack Butala: That's how I would handle the whole thing. I wouldn't even really seriously look into it that much.