Easements Explained: What Property Owners Need to Know
If you’ve looked at a Record of Title, subdivision plan, or LIM report, you’ve probably come across the word easement. It can sound like legal jargon, but easements are a normal and are a useful part of land ownership. Understanding what one is, and how it might affect your property, helps avoid surprises whether you’re buying, developing, or subdividing.
What Is an Easement?
An easement is a legal right for someone else (for example, a neighbour, a council, or a utility provider) to use a certain part of your land for a specific purpose. You still own the land; you’re just allowing a specific right over part of it. Common examples include shared driveways, and pipes or cables for water, power, wastewater and stormwater running across a property to reach their destination.
The land carrying the easement is called the Burdened Land (previously called the Servient Tenement), and the land benefiting from it is the Benefited Land (previously the Dominant Tenement). Easements registered on the title, so they carry through to future owners rather than disappearing when the property is sold.
Why Do Easements Exist?
Easements let land and services function properly when one property depends on another to get access or servicing. If a section in town was to be subdivided, and new lots created at the rear, rather than having a separate strip of land for each lot, it’s far more practical to grant that property a right of way across the neighbouring lot. We use this approach regularly when subdividing sites to both enable the subdivision and to minimise access construction costs.
The same logic applies to services. Water, power, wastewater and telecommunications lines often need to cross more than one property to reach where they’re going, and the easement is what protects that arrangement and stops a future owner from blocking or removing it.
Common Types of Easements
Right of Way Easements. These easements let someone travel across another property to reach their own land. These turn up constantly in rear sections, shared driveways, lifestyle blocks, and rural subdivisions, and are probably the type of easement most property owners will actually encounter.
Service Easements. These allow infrastructure such as water mains, sewer and stormwater pipes, power and fibre cables, to run through a property. You may never notice one day-to-day, but it can restrict where you’re able to build. Without these, many properties simply wouldn’t have a legal outlet for their drainage.
Easements in Gross. Not every easement is tied to a neighbouring property. Some, called easements in gross, benefit a council or utility company directly rather than another piece of land, for example a council’s right to maintain a stormwater pipe running through a private section or an overhead transmission line crossing a portion of a property. These work a little differently in practice but they’re just as common.
Who’s Responsible for Maintenance?
This is one of the most common sources of confusion, and disputes, that we see. Under the Land Transfer Regulations 2018, where more than one party benefits from an easement (a shared driveway, for instance), each party is generally responsible for an equal share of maintenance and repair costs, unless the easement instrument on the title says otherwise. There are two main exceptions: if one party’s use causes the damage (heavy contractor traffic wrecking a shared drive, for example), that party wears the cost; and parties can agree in advance to different proportions, which is common where one property is much further up a long shared driveway and uses more of it than the others.
For easements in gross, the rules are the opposite. The council or utility holding the benefit is responsible for the full cost of maintaining their own infrastructure, not the landowner.
How Can an Easement Affect My Property?
In most cases an easement makes little difference to how you use your land, but it can create restrictions. You generally can’t build over an easement, you may need approval before constructing near an easement area, access rights need to stay unobstructed, and utility providers retain the right to access their infrastructure for maintenance. None of this means an easement is a problem, it just means part of your property carries obligations that need to be respected, both by you and by whoever benefits from it.
Does an Easement Affect Property Value?
Not usually. A standard drainage or service easement along a boundary rarely has a meaningful effect on a property’s value or usefulness. Where it can matter more is when an easement sits across a critical part of the site, for example, over the best building platform, or through the middle of a paddock you’d hoped to subdivide. In those cases it can limit design options, subdivision potential, or add cost to a development. The impact really comes down to location and purpose, not the mere existence of the easement.
Will I Need Easements If I Subdivide?
Often, yes. Where a subdivision creates lots that share a driveway, or where services need to cross from one new lot to another, easements are how those arrangements get formalised. We identify these needs during the scheme plan stage, well before the consent application is lodged, and they get shown on the plan and carried through to the final titles. Council conditions of consent commonly require easements to be created for exactly this reason, to make sure any shared access or servicing arrangement between the new lots is legally protected once titles are issued, not left as an informal understanding between neighbours.
Easements often sit alongside other title notations like covenants, so it’s worth understanding both before you plan a layout.
Can an Easement Be Removed?
They can, although how straightforward this is depends on whether it’s happening as part of a subdivision or on its own.
If you’re subdividing, it’s often the easiest time to deal with an easement that’s no longer needed, for example, an old right of way that a new layout makes redundant. We identify these during the scheme plan stage, and they’re listed on the plan as being surrendered. Once the subdivision is approved and the plan deposited, the easement is formally cancelled as part of that process, no separate application required.
Removing an easement outside of a subdivision is a different matter, and generally works one of three ways:
- Consent of the affected parties. If everyone who benefits from the easement agrees to give it up, this is by far the simplest path. A surrender document is registered against the title and that removes the easement.
- Application to LINZ. This applies where the easement is redundant, most commonly because the benefited land no longer adjoins the burdened land, or the easement clearly isn’t being used anymore. In practice this isn’t as simple as it sounds. LINZ gives every affected party notice and a right to object, and each objection has to be considered before the easement can be removed. Applications are far more likely to succeed if consent has already been sorted with most affected parties beforehand, and a surveyor’s input on the history and current use of the easement carries real weight here.
- Court order. This is generally a last resort, used where agreement can’t be reached and the redundancy test criteria as assessed by LINZ (see above) isn’t clearly met.
If you think an easement on your property is no longer relevant, it’s worth getting a surveyor to check the history and current use before deciding which path is best.
How Do I Find Out If My Property Has Easements?
Check your Record of Title, survey plans, and LIM report. We can also review these for you and explain what any existing easements actually mean for your property, including whether one might affect a future subdivision or development plan. It’s common for landowners to discover an easement they didn’t know existed, particularly on older titles or properties that have changed hands a few times.
Get in Touch
If you’d like us to check your title for existing easements, or you’re planning a subdivision and want to understand what access or servicing arrangements it’s likely to require, get in touch. We can talk you through what’s involved for your specific property.
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