Real Property Characteristics, Legal Descriptions, and Property Use
Real versus personal property
The fixture test is remembered as MARIA: Method of attachment, Adaptability to the property's use, Relationship of the parties, Intention, and Agreement. Intention usually controls when the facts conflict. Trade fixtures (a tenant's business equipment) and emblements (growing crops) remain personal property. An appurtenance runs with the land; a license is personal, revocable permission and is not an interest in land. The classic trap is a stem that reverses MARIA's significance or treats a tenant's removable shelving as a fixture.
Water, air, and subsurface rights
Riparian rights attach to land bordering a river or stream; littoral rights attach to land bordering a lake or the ocean. Air rights can be severed and sold as an air lot, and mineral rights can be severed from the surface estate, creating a dominant subsurface estate.
Legal descriptions
Three systems dominate: metes and bounds (a point of beginning plus calls for bearings, distances, and monuments, with monuments controlling over stated distances), lot and block (a recorded plat referencing lots and blocks), and the government survey system (a principal meridian and baseline; a township is 6 miles square and contains 36 sections of 640 acres each, numbered so that section 1 sits in the northeast corner and section 6 in the northwest corner).
Rule of thumb and worked example
One section equals one square mile, or 640 acres, or 43,560 square feet times 640. To measure a fractional description, multiply the fractions by 640. The NE 1/4 of the SE 1/4 of Section 12 is one quarter of one quarter of 640, or 40 acres. Remember that sections 6, 7, 18, 19, 30, and 31 form the western edge of every township.