What to Check Before You Close on Land: Title, Easements, Drainage Liens, and Mineral Rights

The four things a handshake deal won't tell you

Mid-summer is closing season. Solar and wind developers are pushing lease offers before harvest schedules get in the way, buyers want dirt under contract before fall planting decisions lock in, and heirs are trying to settle an estate before the property tax bill comes due again. Everyone's moving fast. That's exactly the problem.

Four things get skipped in almost every rushed land deal: unresolved title issues, conservation easements, drainage liens, and severed mineral rights. None of them show up in a broker's pitch deck. All four can quietly erase resale value or lock you into restrictions you never agreed to. Here's what each one actually does, and how to check before you sign anything, not after.

What is a title search and why does it matter for land

A title search establishes who actually owns the parcel, free of competing claims. Sounds basic. It isn't always clean. Old estates that were never formally settled, boundary disputes from a fence line that moved decades ago, unpaid tax liens from a prior owner: any of these can cloud a title and stall a sale, sometimes for months, sometimes permanently until a court sorts it out.

This matters most for heirs. If you inherited farmland and the title was never cleared through probate, you may not be able to sell, lease, or borrow against it until that's fixed. A title search won't fix it for you, but it tells you the problem exists before you've told a buyer or a lender it's ready to go.

How a conservation easement restricts what you can do with land

A conservation easement is a permanent, recorded restriction on how a parcel can be used, usually limiting development, restricting the amount of land that can be converted to non-agricultural use, or capping building density. It runs with the land, not the owner, which means it survives every future sale.

Here's the part that surprises buyers: easements don't expire when you buy the property. If the previous owner enrolled the parcel in a conservation program or sold a conservation easement to a land trust years ago, that restriction is still attached today, and it will still be attached when you try to sell it or lease it for solar. A developer evaluating your parcel for a project will find this. Better that you find it first, and know exactly what it caps before you price the land or negotiate a lease.

Why drainage liens attach to the land, not the person who signed them

Drainage liens are the quiet one. In many counties, when a drainage district assesses costs for tile, ditches, or water management infrastructure, that assessment can attach to the parcel itself, not to whoever happened to own it when the work was done. That means an unpaid or partially paid drainage assessment can follow the land through a sale and land squarely on the new owner's desk.

This is one more reason water infrastructure deserves a real look before closing, not a glance. What water does to farmland value covers how drainage, flooding, and irrigation access shape what a parcel is actually worth, and a lien is the most direct way water problems turn into a dollar figure at resale.

What happens when mineral rights were severed from the surface

This is the one that catches the most people off guard. Mineral rights and surface rights can be severed, meaning someone sold the mining or drilling rights under a parcel decades ago while keeping the surface land, or vice versa. That severance is recorded, permanent, and often invisible unless you go looking for it.

If the mineral rights under your land were severed generations ago, the current mineral rights holder, not you, can legally drill, mine, or extract resources beneath your feet, sometimes with very limited surface owner consent required depending on the state. You can own the ground, the barn, the fence line, and still not own what's underneath it. This is a materially different situation from a solar or wind lease, where at least you're the one deciding what to sign. Severed mineral rights mean someone else already decided, before you ever bought the place.

Why brokers and fast deals won't surface this for you

None of this is hidden out of malice. It's hidden because digging through county recorder offices, easement registries, drainage district records, and mineral rights histories takes time, and slowing down a sale is not in a broker's interest, nor a developer's, when they're trying to get ink on a lease before the season turns. A pitch deck is built to move you toward a signature, not to flag the assessment lien sitting on the parcel three owners back.

That's not a reason to distrust every deal on the table. It's a reason to run your own check before you rely on someone else's version of the parcel's history, especially if you're evaluating a solar or wind lease where restrictions like conservation easements can directly affect what you're even allowed to build.

The fast first pass any buyer or heir should run

Before you get deep into due diligence, lawyers, or a signature, run the address. Agriterra Scout's free parcel analysis takes any U.S. address and turns it into a plain-language read in under a minute, no account required, no GIS degree needed to understand it.

For anyone actually closing, signing a lease, or settling an estate, the Full Land Report ($39/parcel) goes deeper: eight categories including flood risk, water, and value, pulled from six federal sources (USDA NRCS, NREL PVWatts, FEMA, USGS, USFWS, USDA NASS) with zero proprietary black box. Every data point is cited back to its federal source, so you're not taking anyone's word for it, including ours.

If you're an heir staring down a parcel you didn't ask to inherit, or a buyer about to wire funds on a summer deal, the gut check is simple: run the address before you sign, not after. That's the one decision that's still entirely yours to make.

Run your parcel through Agriterra Scout before this one closes.