Finding an easement on a property in Georgia days before closing is unsettling, but it is rarely a reason to walk away. What it calls for is an orderly look at three documents: the title commitment, the recorded plat and a current survey. Between them, most metro Atlanta buyers and sellers can tell quickly if they face a recorded right someone has always held, or a neighbor's fence that drifted over the line.
What Is an Easement and How Does It Affect What I Can Build?
An easement is a right for someone else to use a defined part of your land for a stated purpose: a utility line, a drainage channel, a shared driveway, a sewer main. You still own the ground and still pay taxes on it. What changes is what you can place on it. Most easements limit permanent structures inside the easement area, which is why they surface fastest when a buyer has pool, addition or fence plans.
Georgia recognizes more than one route by which a right of way over another's land arises. Georgia Code Section 44-9-1 provides that it may come from an express grant, from prescription by seven years' uninterrupted use through improved lands or by 20 years' use through wild lands, by implication of law when necessary to the enjoyment of lands granted by the same owner, or by compulsory purchase through the superior court. Code Section 44-9-6 adds that an easement may be lost by abandonment or forfeited by nonuse. An express grant is a document you can read; a prescriptive claim is an argument about facts and years.
How Easements Get Recorded and Reach Your Title Commitment
Georgia runs a statewide real property records system through the Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority, covering deed, lien and plat dockets for every county, indexed by grantor and grantee, subdivision and lot, street address and plat name. When the examiner runs that chain, anything recorded that burdens the parcel lands on Schedule B of the title commitment as an exception: a 1968 power company easement across the rear twelve feet, a drainage easement dedicated at platting, a shared driveway easement recorded in 1994. These transfer with the land.
What Is the Difference Between a Recorded Easement and an Unrecorded Encroachment?
A recorded easement lives in the chain of title. A title exam finds it and it appears on Schedule B with or without a survey. An encroachment is a physical condition, not a document: a structure sitting where it should not sit. Nothing in the deed records describes it. It appears only when a licensed surveyor measures the property and draws what is actually there.
That distinction drives what follows. A recorded easement has a written scope, so the question is how it affects use. An encroachment found on survey Atlanta transactions turn up is an open question: how far over, by whose structure, and what the neighbor understands about it. The first is a reading exercise. The second is a negotiation.
What Happens if a Survey Shows a Neighbor's Fence on My Property?
In most cases, a conversation followed by a recorded document. A fence on the property line Georgia buyers inherit was usually built to a hedge, a grade break or an old post rather than to a surveyed corner. The standard path is to acknowledge the condition in writing rather than let it accumulate quietly.
Timing carries weight. Georgia Code Section 44-4-6 provides that acquiescence for seven years by acts or declarations of adjoining landowners shall establish a dividing line. The Georgia firm Stewart, Melvin and Frost notes in its overview of state boundary law that an oral agreement combined with seven years of actual possession may be binding between neighbors, and that even small encroachments can lead title insurers to balk. That is why "it has been there forever" is a reason to act rather than relax.
The Metro Atlanta Cases That Come Up Most
Several patterns repeat: utility and drainage easements crossing lots platted decades before the current house was built, shared driveways serving two homes off a single curb cut on narrow intown streets, retaining walls built by one owner that hold up the neighbor's grade, fences set to convenience rather than to the line, mechanical pads and sheds inside a side setback, and eaves or bay windows projecting past a building line.
What Does a Current Survey Reveal That a Title Exam Alone Does Not?
A title exam reads documents. A survey measures ground. The exam finds the recorded easement and tells you where the deed says it runs. Only the survey shows that the neighbor's garage apron sits four feet inside it, or that the fence you assumed was the line is two feet onto the adjoining lot. That gap catches buyers late.
Georgia sets expectations for what a plat shows. The Georgia Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors Board plat checklist calls for apparent encroachments, servitudes or easements with references, boundary line evidence such as fences, adjoining owners with deed and plat references, labeled property corners, and the surveyor's certification, seal and license number. Recording is governed by the Georgia Plat Act at Code Section 15-6-67, which requires electronic filing with the clerk of superior court.
We covered sequencing separately in do you need a survey to close on an Atlanta home. Order it early, inside the Georgia due diligence period, while the contract still gives a buyer room to respond.
Can You Close on a House With an Encroachment?
Frequently, yes. Most encroachments discovered before a metro Atlanta closing are modest, longstanding and resolvable on paper. The parties pick a treatment, document it and close on schedule. Transactions collapse over boundary issues far less often than over the panic the discovery causes. What matters is choosing quickly rather than arguing about fault.
How These Typically Get Resolved
Five approaches account for most outcomes. The survey exception stays in the policy and the buyer accepts a condition that affects nothing they plan to do. An encroachment agreement or license is recorded, acknowledging the structure and setting terms for eventual removal. A boundary line agreement fixes the line where both owners accept it. A corrected plat is recorded to reflect the agreed configuration. Or the parties handle it commercially: removal before closing, a price adjustment, or funds held against the cost of cure. Which one fits is a question for the closing attorney and each party's own counsel.
Who Pays to Fix a Boundary Problem?
No Georgia rule assigns the cost. It is a negotiated term, settled against the contract already signed, the stage the transaction has reached and what the lender needs to fund. A seller wanting a clean file often absorbs a surveyor's fee and recording cost. A buyer who wants the house often accepts a condition that does not interfere with intended use.
Leverage moves with the market. The July 2026 Atlanta REALTORS Market Brief, compiled by First Multiple Listing Service across eleven metro counties, reported a median sales price of $445,000, 20,863 active listings, 4.7 months of supply, an average 24 days on market and 30 cumulative days on market. Georgia MLS figures reported in September 2026 for August 2026 showed 22,897 active listings and 8,473 new listings against a $400,000 median, with Georgia MLS chief marketing officer John Ryan describing a shift from a market where buyers competed for homes to one where homes compete for buyers. Redfin data for the city of Atlanta in August 2026 put the median sale price at $427,467, up 9.1 percent over the three months ending that month, with a median 57 days on market.
That is a market carrying more standing inventory and longer marketing times than a year or two ago. For a seller, it argues against forcing a buyer to absorb a boundary problem and then re-entering a deeper listing pool. For a buyer, it argues against treating a documentable condition as a reason to start over.
Will Title Insurance Cover an Encroachment?
It depends on the policy form and on what Schedule B excepts. The American Land Title Association owner's policy comparison chart shows the owner's policy addressing encroachments under Covered Risk 2.c, reaching any encroachment that would be disclosed by an accurate and complete land title survey of the land, with the 2021 form adding express coverage for boundary line overlaps. A survey exception on Schedule B can take those matters back out.
Enhanced coverage sits differently. Stewart's ALTA policy comparison indicates the homeowner's policy includes, without a separate endorsement, encroachments and boundary line disputes that would be disclosed by a survey, plus protection if you must remove existing structures because they encroach into an easement or over a setback line. The same chart treats those items in the standard owner's policy as available by endorsement. Ask the title agent and closing attorney, in writing, which form is being issued and what Schedule B excepts, keeping in mind that the closing attorney's role is narrower than most buyers assume, as we explained in who the Georgia closing attorney actually represents.
Who to Call and in What Order
Start with a licensed Georgia land surveyor, because until the condition is measured and drawn, everything else is speculation. Give the surveyor the title commitment so easements of record can be plotted against what exists on the ground, then bring both to the closing attorney, who will say what can be cleared, what can be excepted and what needs a recorded agreement. If exposure is significant, retain your own counsel.
FAQ
Can I move my neighbor's fence back to the surveyed line? That is a question for your own attorney, not something to act on unilaterally. Georgia's acquiescence provision at Code Section 44-4-6 means the history of the line matters, and self-help tends to create a dispute rather than end one.
How long does it take to clear an encroachment before closing? It varies with the fix. A survey exception accepted as written takes minutes. A recorded encroachment or boundary line agreement takes as long as both owners need to sign, which is usually the constraint.
If the title commitment did not list an encroachment, is there not one? Not necessarily. Commitments reflect recorded documents. Encroachments are physical conditions and generally do not appear in the records at all. That gap is why a current survey exists as a separate step.
Conclusion
An easement or encroachment surfacing a week before closing is a process problem, not a catastrophe. The recorded easement comes from the title exam and defines what someone else may do on part of your land. The encroachment comes from the survey and describes what is physically out of place. Georgia transactions rely on a well-worn set of tools for both: survey exceptions, encroachment agreements, boundary line agreements, corrected plats and commercial adjustments. If a survey or title commitment on your metro Atlanta transaction has raised a boundary question, contact The Agency Atlanta for a conversation about your situation alongside your closing attorney and surveyor.
