Worst Real Estate Investments Possible

Jack Butala: Worst Real Estate Investments Possible. 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:                            Happy Friday.

Jack Butala:                         Yeah. Yeah.

Jill DeWit:                            First Friday in 2017. Woohoo!

Jack Butala:                         Yeah.

Jill DeWit:                            Did you make through your first week?

Jack Butala:                         I have to say-

Jill DeWit:                            Are you suffering?

Jack Butala:                         It was a long holiday season. I love being back to work now.

Jill DeWit:                            What? What? What?

Jack Butala:                         In this episode, Jack and Jill ... Jill's gonna get me for that in a minute.

Jill DeWit:                            I know.

Jack Butala:                         In this episode, Jill and I talk about the worst real estate investments possible. We've all been there. Maybe you're there right now. Let's take a look. But first let's take a question posted by one of our members. From the landacademy.com online community. It's free.

Jill DeWit:                            Cool. Luke, I'm not sure which one in our group said, because it's such a good question it could be either one of them. They're both smart. How do I create easements?

Jack Butala:                         This is a great question.

Jill DeWit:                            Could I just write up my own easement on the deeds. I kind of like this. To give access to the back lot across the front lot of which I own both.

Jack Butala:                         Yeah. Put whatever you want in that deed.

Jill DeWit:                            I think that's kind of cool. I like that.

Jack Butala:                         I really don't like my fourth child. Can I just reprogram his brain how I want?

Jill DeWit:                            That's good. I like that.

Jack Butala:                         No, you can't just put an easement on a deed. In 1952 you might have been able to do that.

Jill DeWit:                            Right.

Jack Butala:                         But, no. You have to file for easements with the county. I mean, maybe there's a county out there that still allows you to do that. There are counties that certainly allow you, that are agricultural-based, they allow you split off property if you're deeding it to a family member or they allow you to split off property only to certain numbers, but for easements, you have to file a whole plan. Here's the takeaway, Luke, and you're right. Both of these guys ... This is PhD level stuff.

Jill DeWit:                            Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jack Butala:                         An easement, for the record, is a right of way across someone else's property, an adjacent property to property that you own, so you can get there. So you can get to your own property. So you have to file a bunch of stuff and you have to ... The best way to do it is to get ownership consent from that property. I should say that all the statutes, or nearly all of them that I've ever seen say if you own property you can't reasonably withhold access to another person's property. So you can ram it down the owner's throat or you can just call in and say, "I'd really like to put a road in or put a platted easement in here." If you see dotted lines on a plat map, that's usually the easement.

The solid line is the property line. So, no, you can't just write your own easements in. Nine times out of 10, the easements aren't written in the deed anyway. You might see them sometimes in the old school ones where they're talking about minutes and degrees and things like that, but in general,