Two parcels can sit side by side with identical zoning and identical soil, and one can be worth substantially less because of paperwork recorded decades ago. Easements and deed restrictions travel with the land, not with the person who agreed to them, so they become yours the moment you close.

Easements: someone else's right to use your land

An easement gives a party the legal right to use a defined part of your property for a specific purpose. You still own the land; you just can't block that use. The common ones:

• Utility easements— the power, water, or gas company's right to run and maintain lines across a strip of the parcel. You generally can't build on that strip, which can shrink where a house can physically go.
• Access easements— a neighbor's recorded right to cross your land to reach theirs. If your parcel is the one being crossed, expect traffic. If your parcel is the one doing the crossing, you want that easement to exist — see landlocked land.
• Drainage easements — the right for water to flow across or collect on part of the parcel. Often overlaps with the least buildable ground.
• Conservation easements — a permanent restriction on developing some or all of the parcel, usually held by a land trust or government body. These can be very restrictive and are effectively impossible to undo.

Deed restrictions and covenants

These are private rules written into the chain of title, usually by whoever originally subdivided the land. They can be far stricter than zoning, and the county has nothing to do with enforcing them — neighbors and HOAs do, in civil court.

Typical restrictions on rural and subdivision land:

• Minimum home square footage — a common reason a cabin or tiny home plan dies
• No manufactured, modular, or mobile homes
• No RVs or camping on the parcel while you build
• No subdividing the parcel further
• Required architectural review or approved exterior materials
• Limits on livestock, outbuildings, or running a business
• Mandatory HOA membership and dues, even on vacant land

Note that last one. Buying an empty lot in a platted subdivision can come with HOA dues you pay every year while nothing is built.

Mineral and water rights may not come with the land

In much of the US, mineral rights can be severed from surface rights and sold separately. If someone else owns the minerals under your parcel, they may have the legal right to access the surface to get to them. Water rights work similarly in many western states, where owning land near water does not automatically grant the right to use it.

Ask explicitly whether mineral and water rights convey with the sale. Don't assume.

How to find all of this

None of it lives in a public map or dataset you can query. It lives in recorded documents in the county land records, and finding it reliably means asking someone to look:

• Order a title search early— before you're under contract if you can, not during the final week of closing. A title company will pull recorded easements, restrictions, liens, and the chain of ownership.
• Ask for the recorded plat of the subdivision, which usually shows platted easements graphically.
• Ask the seller in writingfor any CC&Rs, HOA documents, and known easements. Get it in writing so it's a representation, not a memory.
• Read the title commitment's exceptions. This is the section people skip. Schedule B lists exactly what the title insurance will notcover, and that list is a precise inventory of what's recorded against the parcel.

Why an address check can't tell you this

Flood zones, wetlands and hazard ratings are published as machine-readable government layers, so software can check them from an address in seconds. Easements and deed restrictions are scanned documents filed in a county courthouse, indexed by name and book-and-page. No tool can reliably read them from an address — including ours. This is the part you pay a title company for, and it's worth every dollar.