As circumstances change, you often need to address changes in your easements. Here’s an example that illustrates that point.
Case Study
We had a client who was developing a new piece of property that had not been built up before, which was right next to a group of parcels (including a small shopping center and a developer parcel). There was a reciprocal easement agreement among the property owners of this shopping center area (which included the developer parcel) for streets in particular places so that they be private streets that people could run across. The city, in this case, was requiring that our developer get an easement across that adjacent property for emergency access to their site.
The challenge to that was we already had these private street easements in place, and now we needed to add ingress and egress to an additional parcel. The question that arose from this was “who needs to give us that easement?”
Ultimately, when we looked at it we determined that it depended on where the easement would run. If it was exclusively on the developer’s parcel and not on these streets that were co-maintained by the whole group, then we could have an easement just from that developer. But if it was going to use the roads that were already in place, we had to get all of those participants in the reciprocal easement agreement to join in a modification or to join in the easement.