Usage, the act of using or being used. If you own your land without any easements, you currently have 100% usage as you see fit. Usage is part of the previously mentioned “bundles of rights” discussed earlier but requires further discussion.
In the first series, we discussed land values and aesthetics. In the second series, we discussed easements and habitat fragmentation. In the third series, we discussed the future of your land, and today, we will discuss usage of your land.
Owning your own land typically means you are in control of it. You can sell it, manage it, neglect it, graze it, hunt it, invite friends and restrict enemies from it. But the most important part of all if this is that you can USE IT as YOU see fit. If you want to run a prescribed burn on it, you can. If you want to bulldoze every tree on it, you can. If you want to protect it, you can. If you want to swim in the ponds or creek, you can. So you can use the ranch anytime and in any manner that YOU want to. This is a really important aspect of land ownership in Texas—you can use the ranch entirely based on your goals and objectives, whims or desires, if it doesn’t break any laws!
But when others have legal permission (easements, rights of way) to access your property and to construct permanent structures, your usage becomes far more limited. For example, if you have an oil or gas pipeline or an overhead transmission line on your property, you still own the land but you can no longer use it as you wish. You cannot build permanent structures such as a house, a fishing camp, a set of cattle pens or a barn across/ over/under those easements— your usage is now restricted. You cannot construct a lake that will back water up across those easements and you will be very limited burying waterlines or electric lines across them. Again, your usage becomes limited for the life of the easement, and those specific easements are typically multi-generational, meaning not only YOU cannot build across them, but neither can your children, grandchildren or great grandchildren--or any other potential buyer of that property for that matter. So easements and rights of ways restrict your usage on how you utilize your ranch, and it also prevents you from denying access to those that have permission to use it. Another example could include aircraft usage and an overhead transmission line. Let’s say you own a small airplane and have a landing strip on your ranch. If the overhead transmission line is placed in a manner that crosses, or immediately parallels that airstrip, your airplane days using that strip are now over. What if you use a helicopter to round up livestock, conduct aerial predation work, conduct game surveys or wildlife captures? The overhead transmission lines create a whole new challenge for the helicopter pilot that will obviously increase the danger factor, will likely force survey route alterations and will make their effective use more difficult.
Usage is hard to quantify if it is endless. It is much harder to quantify what a specific use is worth if it is permanently removed, like the inability to build permanent structures across the easement. What is that really worth to you and what COULD it be worth to your heirs or potential buyers years down the road? If you cannot easily cross water and electric lines across the easement that divides your property in half, for example, will the other half of the property have decreased value because it may lack reliable water and electric access into the future? According to the real estate industry, the answer is a huge yes and they have piles of data to support that claim. So when you lose usage of your property for one thing, there are oftentimes three or four other “downstream” impacts you have not yet realized that will also be impacted. And the easement payments will not pay you for those unrealized restrictions now in the future; you simply lose out with no compensation considerations.
Usage is huge and is hard to describe and even harder to put a price tag on once you begin that difficult process. If you are a landowner, you should not be thinking short term and about today but rather considering the long term, unknown impacts, and how your decisions today will permanently shape the future of that property forever more.