Heirs gap from 1978 and a neighbor's gravel drive across the corner

Sixty days and he won't pay for the cure. That's a seller telling you the price is $128,000 minus the cost of his problem, he just hasn't done the subtraction yet. I'd go back at $112,000 with the curative work on me and see what he says.

Quiet title addresses the missing heir. It does very little about the drive, and it can make the drive worse. A quiet title action determines rights as against the parties you serve and the outcome depends on the elements of your state's statute, so the specifics here are for your attorney, but the general shape is this: if the neighbor's use has met your state's requirements for a prescriptive easement, and 40-plus years of open use often does, then naming him in a quiet title suit invites him to plead and prove it and get a judgment establishing the easement on the record. Right now he has an unrecorded claim that a future buyer might never test. After your suit he may have a recorded one.

On insurability, a judgment doesn't automatically produce a policy. The underwriter decides what it will insure. Many underwriters will want the judgment plus a waiting period for appeal, and some will still take an exception if service was by publication only, because a defaulted absent heir can sometimes move to set the judgment aside within a statutory window. Ask the title agent now, in writing, what the underwriter needs to delete that exception. That answer, not the attorney's fee estimate, tells you whether the $9,000 buys anything.

There may be a cheaper path. Depending on the state, an affidavit of heirship, a limited probate of the 1978 estate, or a quitclaim purchased from the missing heir's line can be enough for the underwriter, and buying a quitclaim from a located heir for a few thousand is often faster than litigation.

Also settle who pays taxes and who insures the timber during a 14 month suit, because on an unimproved 40 that's the sort of thing nobody thinks about until a claim.

The drive point reframes it. If you plan to hold this for 20 years and never develop the northeast corner, an unrecorded 400 foot gravel path across a wooded corner costs you almost nothing, and paying $8,000 to convert it into a recorded easement is paying to damage your own title. Cure the heirs gap, leave the neighbor alone, price the exception into what you offer.

Depends where the road frontage is. If that northeast corner is where a future entrance would go, the drive is the whole deal and not a footnote. arbor, is the corner your only practical access point to the county road, or is there frontage elsewhere on the 40? On a wooded parcel the culvert and entrance permit location usually gets decided by drainage and sight distance, and you don't get many choices.