Parcel maps, property search, and county GIS guides

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• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a Variable-Width Easement? A variable-width easement changes width along its length, usually by stations or by ties to a centerline and a property line. There is no single offset you can use for the whole strip. Each segment has its own dimension.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a Cross-Access Easement? A cross-access easement lets traffic pass between adjoining parcels, usually so driveways or parking lots connect and cars can reach a public street without a new curb cut. Each lot is often both burdened and benefited. It is a shared route, not a transfer of the land under the pavement.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a Maintenance Easement? A maintenance easement is a strip on the neighbor’s lot that lets an owner reach their own wall or roof to repair it, usually on a zero-lot-line or townhouse plat. It is a temporary right to enter for upkeep. It is not a yard, a storage area, or a second driveway.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is an Eave Easement? An eave easement allows a roof overhang, gutter, or similar projection to occupy the air above the neighboring lot. It legalizes a specific encroachment the plat expects. It does not let you push a new addition across the line.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a Flowage Easement? A flowage easement gives a dam owner or an agency the right to flood, sometimes permanently and sometimes intermittently, up to a stated elevation or contour. The landowner often keeps the fee and loses the right to complain about that flooding. It is not the same thing as a flood-zone overlay on a tax map.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is an Avigation Easement? An avigation easement gives an airport the right to have aircraft fly through the airspace above a parcel, often with stated heights, and usually with a tolerance for noise and vibration. It burdens the air above the lot. It is not a deed of the lot to the airport.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a Solar Access Easement? A solar access easement protects a path for sunlight to a collector or a lot, usually by limiting vegetation and structures on the neighbor’s land above a described plane. It is a written burden. A sunny yard without that document is only a sunny yard.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a View Easement? A view easement restricts what a neighbor may build or grow, so a described view from the dominant lot stays open. It is a private height and vegetation limit. It is not a general right to a pretty outlook, and a tax map will not show it.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is Merger of an Easement? Merger ends an easement when the same person owns both the dominant and the servient estates in the same way, because an owner does not need an easement over their own land. A later sale can leave a buyer without the easement they assumed still existed.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a Release of Easement? A release of easement is a recorded instrument in which the holder gives up the easement, in whole or in part. The burden ends only to the extent the release says. A letter, a removed fence, or a blank GIS layer is not a release.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a License to Cross Land? A license is permission to do something on land, such as cross it, that does not create an interest in the land. It is usually revocable. It does not run with the land the way an appurtenant easement does. A long-standing favor is still a favor until someone grants an easement.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is an Easement by Necessity? An easement by necessity is a right of access that the law may imply when a parcel is split and one piece is left without any legal way to a public road. It is a legal conclusion from a severance and a necessity. It is not a shortcut you declare because the public road would be more convenient.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Overburdening an Easement Means Overburdening is using an easement beyond the purpose or the intensity the grant allows, such as serving a new subdivision through a driveway granted for one house. The extra use is not automatically illegal on a website. It is a violation of the limits written in the easement.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a Septic Reserve Area? A septic reserve area, or replacement area, is ground the plat or the health permit sets aside for a future drainfield if the first one fails. It is not a building pad, a pool site, or spare lawn. Covering it can leave the lot with no legal place for a replacement system.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a Well Protection Radius? A well protection radius is a circle, often of a set footage, around a water well inside which septic fields, tanks, or chemical storage are forbidden or limited. It is a health setback. It is not a property line and not an easement unless a separate easement was granted.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a Detention Pond Tract? A detention pond tract is a parcel on the plat set aside to hold stormwater and release it slowly. It is common area or a dedicated drainage tract, not a leftover lot for a house. The water in it is a designed function, not a fishing right.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is a Transformer Pad Easement? A transformer pad easement is a small utility easement, often a square on a side lot or in an easement along the rear line, where the power company may set a ground transformer. It is a defined pad site inside the larger utility picture. It is not a license for the neighbor to store bins, and it is not the whole side yard.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is Accretion along a River? Accretion is the gradual, imperceptible addition of land by the deposit of soil along a water boundary. When the boundary is ambulatory, the owner may gain that slow addition. A sudden dump of fill is not accretion, and a tax map’s moving shoreline is not a conveyance.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is Avulsion? Avulsion is a sudden, perceptible change in a watercourse, such as a channel that jumps in one flood. When a boundary follows the water, avulsion usually leaves the boundary where the channel used to be. The new channel does not, by itself, redraw the deed.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is Reliction? Reliction is land left dry when water recedes gradually and permanently, not by a sudden drop. If the boundary is ambulatory, the exposed land may belong to the upland owner. A lake drawn down by opening a gate is not automatically reliction.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is the Thread of a Stream? The thread of a stream is the center of the main current, used in many deeds as the boundary between opposite owners on a nonnavigable stream. It is not the midline of whatever water you see in a dry week, and it is not automatically the section line that happens to follow the valley.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is the Thalweg? The thalweg is the deepest or strongest part of a navigable channel, the line ships follow. It is used as an international and interstate boundary in some rivers, and it is related to, but not always identical with, the thread of a smaller stream in a private deed.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is an Ambulatory Boundary? An ambulatory boundary is one that can move over time, usually because the deed calls for a natural feature such as a river, a shore, or the thread of a stream. A fixed boundary stays at the monuments or the courses even when the water moves.
• Sep 30, 2026 What Is Mean High Water? Mean high water is a tidal elevation, the average of the high tides over a long epoch, used in many coastal states as the boundary between private upland and public tidelands. It is not the seaweed line from one afternoon, and it is not ordinary high water on an inland lake.