Can a Drone Show Whether a Parcel Has Legal Access?

No. A drone can show you whether a road reaches a parcel, what condition it is in, where the gates and wash crossings are, and whether the route runs across land that belongs to someone else. It cannot show whether you have the right to use that road. That right is a recorded document or a public dedication, and the only place to find it is in the records.

The distinction sounds pedantic until you own a parcel you can drive to but have no right to reach.

Physical access and legal access are different things

Physical access is whether you can get there: a graded road, a two-track, a gate, a wash crossing you can get through in a passenger car or only in a truck.

Legal access is whether you are entitled to get there: a public road that has been dedicated, a recorded easement across a neighbor's land, or some other right that belongs to the parcel and passes to you when you buy it.

Arizona law treats them as two separate questions. The statute on county review of land divisions, A.R.S. § 11-831, defines legal access as "a public right of vehicular ingress and egress." Among the conditions it sets for approving a split, it lists two different pieces of evidence: a preliminary title report or similar document that demonstrates legal access, and, separately, a statement from a licensed surveyor or engineer on whether each new lot has physical access traversable by a two-wheel-drive passenger vehicle. One is established on paper. The other is established by someone looking at the ground.

A parcel can have either without the other. A road can be recorded on a plat and never built. A two-track can have been driven by everyone in the area for decades, across private land, with no recorded right behind it at all.

Why it matters on rural Arizona land

On vacant land in Cochise County and the rest of rural Arizona, several things make this more than a theoretical problem:

• Land that has been split, and split again. Large holdings get divided over the years, and a split can leave an inner parcel with no frontage on a public road. Whether that split left a recorded easement out to a road is a question only the documents answer.
• Roads that cross private land. Many of the dirt roads that reach vacant parcels run across someone else's property. Some are on recorded easements. Some are used by permission, or out of long habit. Whether a route like that can be closed by whoever owns the ground underneath is a legal question you want answered before you buy, not after.
• Public is not the same as maintained. In Cochise County, the Highway Division maintains county roads that have been accepted by the Board of Supervisors, and only roads classified as County Maintained Roads are eligible for county maintenance. A road outside that system may be public, private, or simply unclear, and whoever grades it after a monsoon, it is not the county.
• Deed notices. On some land divisions, § 11-831 requires legal-access or zoning deficiencies to be noticed in the deed. Read the deed for that language.
• Landlocked parcels. Arizona law, in A.R.S. § 12-1202, provides for the owner of land that needs a private way of necessity to condemn one across a neighbor's land. That is a court action against your neighbor, not a form you file. Ask an attorney what it would involve and cost before you count on it.

The Arizona Department of Real Estate's buyer's checklist for land puts permanent legal access on the short list of things to ask about, alongside water supply, utilities and flooding. It is there for a reason.

What a buyer should ask for

This is not legal advice. It is a list of questions to put to the people who give it.

• A preliminary title report, early. Ask the title company to identify the recorded access to the parcel: which road, whether it is a dedicated public road or an easement, and the recording information for each document that connects the parcel to a public road.
• The easement documents themselves. Not just a line in the report. Look at the width, who it benefits, whether it covers ingress and egress only or utilities too, and whether it reaches all the way to your parcel or stops at the one next door.
• What the title policy covers. Ask the title company whether the owner's policy they would issue covers lack of a right of access, and whether any exceptions in the report affect it.
• Whether the roads are county-maintained. Ask the county whether each road on your route is in the county maintenance system. If not, ask the seller who maintains it and whether there is a written road maintenance agreement among the owners who use it.
• The split history. If the parcel came from a recent lot split, ask the county Planning and Zoning Division whether it went through minor land division review, which looks at zoning compliance and physical access.
• An attorney, if anything is unclear. If the title report shows no recorded access, or shows access along a route that does not match the road people actually drive, stop and ask a real estate attorney before you close.

You can start on some of this yourself. The Cochise County Recorder offers an online search of recorded documents, and a first pass by parcel or owner name will tell you whether there is anything obvious to ask about. It does not replace the title company's search.

Where aerial access documentation fits

Once you know what the documents say, the aerial tells you whether the ground matches. That is where it earns its place.

The access route documentation add-on (+$150) shoots the drive in from the nearest public road in sequence: the turn-off, the road surface, gates, cattle guards, wash crossings and the places where the road gets rough. With the boundary overlay (+$95), the county's GIS parcel lines are composited onto the same imagery, so you can see roughly which parcels the route crosses on its way in.

Put that next to the title report and you can ask better questions:

• Does the road people actually drive follow the recorded easement, or run somewhere else?
• Does a recorded easement run through a wash or across ground where nobody has ever built a road?
• Is there a gate on a neighbor's fence across the route, and is it locked?
• Is the last stretch passable in a two-wheel-drive car, or only in a truck, and what happens at the wash crossing?

Two limits apply. The GIS parcel lines are approximate, and an easement is defined by its legal description, not by a line on a photo. Where the answer depends on exactly where a road sits relative to a boundary or an easement, that is a question for an Arizona Registered Land Surveyor. And a long route may need more than one launch point, because the pilot has to keep the aircraft in visual line of sight throughout the flight under 14 CFR 107.31. We will tell you if a route needs that before we quote it.

What aerial documentation never does is establish a right. A photograph of a well-used road is evidence that people drive it. It is not evidence that you may.

The short version

Title work tells you whether you have access. The aircraft shows you what that access looks like on the ground. You want both, in that order.

For everything else a flyover can and cannot tell you before you buy, see What a Drone Flyover Can and Can't Tell You About a Parcel Before You Drive Out. The parcel tier up to 40 acres is $375, with full rates on the pricing page and deliverables on the real estate aerial media page. If you have the parcel number and a title report, send both through the contact page and we will plan the route from the documents.