16.3 Preparing Descriptions for Easements and Other Interests

Domain V, activity 1, names the products: easements, lot line adjustments, and other interests in real property. Independent OpenExamPrep teaching in this section is how to choose a form and write the interest so title, the county recorder, and a retracing surveyor all read the same geometry. Map-sheet contents for Records of Survey, corner records, and Subdivision Map Act maps are a later Domain V activity. This section mentions a Record of Survey only where the lot-line-adjustment statute itself cross-references BPC 8762, without teaching that map’s required elements.

Name the interest before you name the courses

Fee, easement, lease, license, and temporary construction right are different estates. A description that starts “a strip of land 15.00 feet in width” without easement words can be argued as a fee strip. If the client wants a nonexclusive access right, open with an easement for [purpose] over a strip, then give width, centerline or sidelines, and appurtenance language.

Classify the easement in the text when it matters:

• Appurtenant names the dominant tenement: “appurtenant to Lot 11 of said Tract.”
• In gross names the benefited person or utility and usually does not need a dominant lot.
• Exclusive versus nonexclusive changes whether the fee owner may also use the corridor.
• Purpose limits use: ingress and egress is not a blank check for a storm drain. If multiple purposes are intended, list them.
• Vertical limits belong in words if the client only wants underground rights: “for underground electric facilities, together with the right to install and maintain.”

A blanket easement (“over, under, and across said Lot 4”) is locationally weak. Agencies sometimes accept it for a first grant and later want an as-built specific strip. If you can locate the facility now, write the strip now.

Railroad, irrigation, and highway documents may convey fee or easement depending on the granting statute or deed. Read the source instrument before you write a new description that assumes the corridor is only an easement. Railroad retracement methods are a different test-plan topic; here the drafting lesson is to copy the estate the source actually granted.

Easement geometry: strip versus metes

Linear facilities want strip descriptions: width, path, sideline termination, curve concentricity if needed, and a tie to a record line. Polygonal pad sites, well sites, and odd remainders want metes and bounds. Do not force a centerline through a square vault pad.

Worked purpose clause, original teaching: “A nonexclusive easement for underground water pipeline purposes, including the right to construct, inspect, repair, replace, and maintain a water pipeline and related appurtenances, over a strip of land 15.00 feet in width, lying 7.50 feet on each side of the following described centerline: [insert the Lot 4 centerline sequence from section 16.1], the sidelines of said strip to be lengthened or shortened to terminate on the westerly and easterly lines of said Lot 4.”

Add, when true: the easement is appurtenant to a named dominant parcel; or it is in gross to a named district. Add, when true: surface access for maintenance. Add, when the right is temporary: a termination date or a termination tied to acceptance of improvements, and a statement that the right expires and does not remain as a permanent easement.

Portions work for “the easterly 10.00 feet of Lot 6” when Lot 6 is rectangular and the 10 feet is a uniform-width strip along a record line. If Lot 6 is not rectangular, write metes.

Lot line adjustments: the deed is the product

Government Code section 66412(d) makes the Subdivision Map Act inapplicable to a lot line adjustment between four or fewer existing adjoining parcels, where land taken from one parcel is added to an adjoining parcel, and where a greater number of parcels than originally existed is not thereby created, if the local agency (or advisory agency) approves it. Agency review is limited to conformity with the general plan, applicable specific plan, applicable coastal plan, and zoning and building ordinances. The agency may not impose conditions or exactions except to conform to those plans and ordinances, to require prepayment of real property taxes, or to facilitate relocation of existing utilities, infrastructure, or easements. No tentative map, parcel map, or final map shall be required as a condition of approval. The lot line adjustment shall be reflected in a deed, which shall be recorded. No record of survey shall be required for a lot line adjustment unless required by BPC 8762. A local agency shall approve or disapprove pursuant to the Permit Streamlining Act. Section 66412 was amended by Stats. 2024, Ch. 591 (SB 347), effective January 1, 2025; the lot-line-adjustment core quoted here is the operative (d) text as published on the California Legislative Information site.

That statute is why your product is usually new fee descriptions in recorded deeds, not a subdivision map. Typical writing pattern:

1. Confirm the existing parcels are four or fewer, adjoining, and that the result does not add a parcel.
2. Write a description of Resulting Parcel A (parent A plus the area taken from B, or parent A minus the area given to B).
3. Write a description of Resulting Parcel B (the complementary remainder).
4. If three or four parcels participate, write each resulting parcel. Every square foot of the original parcels should appear in exactly one resulting fee description, except interests you are excepting or reserving on purpose.
5. Do not reuse “Lot 12 of Tract 100” as if the lot line never moved, unless the result is still the entire original lot.
6. Watch senior easements that followed the old lot line. The LLA statute allows conditions that facilitate relocation of existing easements; a relocated easement needs its own grant or reservation language, not a silent hope that the old strip jumped.

Whether a Record of Survey is also required is a 8762 question, taught with mapping documents, not here. Do not skip 8762 in practice; do not treat this section as a substitute for that statute, and do not import Record of Survey certificates, border items, or required map notes into these deed descriptions.

Other interests

• Rights-of-way may be fee or easement. Match the granting words.
• Leases of a portion of a parcel need a locatable description if the lease is to be recorded or used as a survey exhibit.
• A license is often personal and revocable; do not dress it up as an appurtenant easement unless counsel intends that estate.
• Temporary construction easements need a term and a clear statement that they expire.
• Air, subsurface, and solar interests still need a horizontal locus plus a vertical or purpose limit.

Who may prepare, sign, and seal

BPC 8726(a)(12) makes determining the locative information in a deed description of a real-property limit a surveying function when tied to the surveying work in 8726(a)(1)–(6). BPC 8761 requires preparation under responsible charge, name and license number on the document, interim notations such as “preliminary” or “for examination only,” and signature, seal or stamp, and date on final documents. If the document has multiple pages, the signature, seal or stamp, and date appear at a minimum on the title sheet, cover sheet or page, or signature sheet, unless otherwise required by law. It is unlawful to sign, stamp, seal, or approve such a document unless authorized to practice land surveying, or to use a seal after the named certificate has expired, been suspended, or been revoked.

BPC 8730(c) is a narrow exemption, not a general drafting holiday. An officer or employee of an electric, gas, or telephone corporation (Public Utilities Code sections 218, 222, and 234) with annual revenues of $25,000,000 or more may prepare a legal description of an easement for utility distribution lines and service facilities without being licensed, if (1) each description identifies the corporation and states it was prepared pursuant to this exemption, and (2) the corporation has in its employ, or on contract, an individual authorized to practice land surveying who is responsible for qualification criteria, format, and answering questions about those descriptions. The exemption does not authorize an unlicensed neighbor, a title typist, or a landowner’s friend to invent locative calls for a private access easement.

Quality loop before the deed records

• Interest words match the contract (fee versus easement versus temporary).
• Parent title in the preamble is the land the grantor owns.
• Body locates on that parent and closes or terminates.
• Exceptions and reservations are labeled and themselves locatable.
• Lot-line-adjustment math does not create a fifth parcel.
• Seal rules in 8761 are satisfied for anything issued as final.