The access right is described in a 1978 deed and nothing since

The part that would have caught this for $400 is the chain search on the neighboring parcels, not on yours. I've had two clients hit the same wall. An easement written in favor of a parcel is fine, an easement written over "lands of the grantor" turns into a puzzle the second that grantor subdivides, because now you're arguing about which of the three successors is burdened. Title companies don't want to argue, so they except it and the buyer's attorney reads the exception and stops.

Also worth saying plainly: you got a real bid from the gate owner. That's the one buyer with a reason to pay. Losing $13,700 on a parcel that could have gone to zero interest for years isn't the worst version of this.

From what I've seen on the paper side, the access problem would have followed you even if the sale had closed. Anybody buying installment paper on rural land wants to know what the collateral is worth if they end up owning it, and a parcel with an uninsurable access exception gets underwritten as landlocked. I've watched offers move 20 points of discount on that single item. So the alternate history where a buyer's attorney was asleep and you closed at $54,900 with 10% down isn't obviously better. You'd be holding a note nobody wants, on a parcel the market won't take back at anything near your basis.

Question though. Did you ever price the landlocked version? 38 acres with no insurable access still has a value to exactly the two owners who touch it, and sometimes to a timber buyer. $19,000 might have been achievable in month two instead of month fourteen.

Still figuring this stuff out, so bear with me. Is an O and E report just cheaper title work, or is it a different thing entirely? I've seen land people online say they use them on everything under $30k because commitments cost too much, and reading this it sounds like the savings is fake.

@tender that's the part I keep tripping on. I've been reading about land notes for a few months and I had assumed the note stands somewhat on the buyer's payment record. You're saying the collateral value drives the pricing even when payments are current?

@ember thanks for the survey number. $2,200 to try to rescue a contract that was already dead is the detail I'll actually remember.

@rigging an O&E, sometimes called a title search or a search abstract, tells you what the searcher found in the records for that parcel. A title commitment is an insurer stating the terms on which it will issue a policy, which means it lists the exceptions it will not cover. The second one is the document that tells you what a buyer's closing agent is going to object to, because it's the same company making the same decision. On low-price rural parcels the cost gap is real, and plenty of operators run searches on the buy side. The trade is that you're taking the insurability question onto yourself.

@vellum current payments matter to a note buyer, and so does collateral. On seller-financed rural land the buyer's down payment is often small and there's no bank appraisal anywhere in the file, so the discount rate is set largely by what the paper holder would recover if they ended up with the dirt. Uninsurable access shrinks that recovery to the handful of adjoining owners who can use the parcel.

One mechanical point on @ember's chain. An easement described as running over the grantor's remaining land can survive a later split, and whether it does, and which successor parcel carries the burden, is determined by state law and the specific language. That's an opinion a title attorney licensed in that state gives, and it's the assumption the whole underwrite rests on. If your model assumes insurable access and you never asked an insurer, you don't have a model yet, you have a hope with a spreadsheet attached.