How a buried 1987 parking easement can reshape the value of a small multifamily deal

Take an 18-unit brick walk-up in a first ring suburb, listed around 1.42M, with 21 striped spaces in the rear lot and a lender who wants at least one space per unit for the loan to work as quoted. Say Schedule B exception 14 references a recorded easement from 1987, described in the commitment in one line. Pulling the actual recorded document from the county can take days, since many counties do not have images online past 2003, and it can turn out to grant an adjacent property exclusive use of six spaces in perpetuity, plus a shared maintenance obligation on the lot. If the seller's rent roll charges for eleven of the twenty-one spaces and six of those are not his to rent, the picture changes fast. In that scenario the lot goes from 21 usable to 15 on 18 units, and the parking income line loses real annual value. At a typical cap rate that easily runs to tens of thousands of dollars of value. A buyer in that position has grounds to ask for a price adjustment and a written acknowledgment of the easement. Sellers often push back hard through their broker. Sending the recorded instrument with a firm earnest money deadline tends to move negotiations, and a late counter with a paid survey is a common outcome. The survey matters as much as the money, because striping frequently does not match the easement's legal description, which raises a boundary and prescriptive use question that a real estate attorney licensed in that state needs to resolve before closing. The real lesson is timeline discipline. Ordering title on day 9 of a 21 day due diligence period leaves only days to negotiate; ordering it on day 2 leaves two full weeks instead of three days of brinkmanship. Recording practice and how easements are indexed vary by state, so how fast the underlying document can be retrieved is always a local question. The habit worth keeping: order title the day the contract is signed, and read every Schedule B exception in full rather than relying on a summary.