What Is an Easement in California Real Estate?

An easement is a right to use another person's land for a defined purpose without owning it. The classic examples are a shared driveway, a private road crossing a neighbor's parcel, and utility lines running under someone else's property. The land burdened by the easement is the servient tenement; the land benefited is the dominant tenement.

California recognizes easements created by written grant or reservation, by implication, by necessity when a parcel would otherwise be landlocked, and by prescription, which requires open, notorious, hostile, and continuous use for five years. Unlike adverse possession, a prescriptive easement does not require paying the property taxes, and it yields a right of use rather than ownership.

Easement litigation usually erupts when one side blocks a road, overburdens a shared driveway, builds over a utility corridor, or claims years of informal use ripened into a permanent right. The recorded chain of title, historical photographs, and testimony about how the land was actually used tend to decide these cases.