The successful bidder for the option to buy the county’s Deer Park property near Escondido plans to record easements across it to benefit his other land in the area, then resell the former motel complex, he said.
Arthur Devine, who owns two separate properties in the area, bid $50,000 for a one-year option to purchase the 434-acre Deer Park near the northeast city limits of Escondido for $4 million early this month.
He said he did it to provide access to one of the ranches that was severed when the city of Escondido bought the Daley Ranch to the northeast of his property.
“I’ve been offered a piece of the Deer Park land and easements from people who have approached me to buy the property,” Devine said. Without the easements, his 88-acre Council Springs Ranch is landlocked and has little resale value, he said.
Council Springs Ranch at one time had an unrecorded road easement and the right, which also was unrecorded, to draw water from a cistern-type well on the Daley Ranch property, he said. A cook for the Daley family originally owned the Council Springs Ranch, and the informal agreement for access and water dates from the turn of the 20th century, Devine said.
To Alan Gin, a professor of urban economics at the University of San Diego, Devine’s situation is an indication of the increasingly litigious nature of American society.
“Now that there is more possible liability involved in granting informal easements, people are afraid of being subjected to a lawsuit,” Gin said. “Easements used to be handshake kind of deals that in the old days didn’t need to be recorded.”
His comments were echoed by Mark Riedy, a professor of real estate finance at the university.
“I think investors in real estate are more sophisticated now and the legal profession has inserted itself into all phases of the real estate process,” Riedy said. “It isn’t a handshake kind of economy any more.”
