Please let me start off by saying my wife and I are very new to this, we just bought our first house 3 months ago. This morning our neighbor said that his landlord came to our house while we were away trying to show us an easement he has on our property and the ADU behind the neighbor’s house.

I was pretty confused because there has previously been no mention of any easements from anyone (escrow/closing officers, city, realtor, insurance, their landlord, nobody). I immediately started searching through our title paperwork. No mention of anything in our grant deed or preliminary transfer of ownership so I turned to the County Assessor’s website, no mention of any easement in our property information, nor on the plat map.

For the first 2 months or so our neighbor’s were using this area for storage, but after a couple of garage sales are now using it to park their car, hence the need of an easement? We like our neighbors and don’t have a problem with them parking their car where they do, I guess we’re just confused whether there is a legitimate claim here or if we’re being played (this land lord doesn’t seem like a nice sort of guy from the neighbors horror stories).

I’ve included 2 pictures of the plat map, the first where you can see the property lines, the second where the fences actually are. Red is our property and blue is the neighbors/landlord. It’s probably worth noting our driveway is located in the back, where the slant is and our neighbor’s have a driveway on the side of their house as well.

Supposed Easement? (CA)