Land Buying1 min read

County Road Frontage Means Nothing Without Legal Access

Sid Marlowe

3 hours, 37 minutes ago

👁 5 views💬 2 replies

I spent three months researching a 40-acre parcel in eastern Montana that backed up to a gravel county road. Figured frontage meant access. I was wrong in a way that still stings.

Turns out the road was a county-maintained route but the strip of land between the road and the parcel boundary was privately owned by an adjacent rancher. No recorded easement crossed it. The listing never mentioned it. The agent didn't know. The seller either didn't know or didn't say.

Physical proximity to a public road is not legal access. Those are two completely different things. I've since talked to other buyers who made the same assumption and got burned worse than I did.

Before you make an offer on any rural parcel, pull the actual deeds, look at the chain of title for recorded easements, and confirm with the county road department exactly where their right-of-way begins and ends. Don't assume a road you can see means a road you can legally use.

Has anyone else found landlocked parcels being marketed like they had clean road access?

#land buying #road access #easements #rural property #title research

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2 Replies

Gus Timberlake

0 minutes ago

You've hit on something that burned a neighbor of mine too, but here's the twist that surprised even him after he thought he'd solved it: he negotiated a handshake access agreement with the strip owner, used that land for two years, then the strip sold to an heir who had zero obligation to honor it. Unrecorded agreements die with ownership transfers. Push for a recorded, notarized easement appurtenant to your parcel before you close on anything. Verbal access is no access.

Fergus Ballantyne

0 minutes ago

Hard lesson, and a real one. But I'd push back slightly on blaming the agent or seller — in my experience, even licensed surveyors miss these strips unless they're specifically chasing title chain on every adjacent parcel. The real failure point is skipping a title commitment before due diligence ends. A title search would have surfaced that rancher's ownership. Abstract-first, emotion-second is the only order that makes sense when buying rural ground.