Encumbrance Assets

Encumbrance assets are for documenting the details of additional encumbrances held over your existing interest / property record, usually held by a third party.  For example, if a property you own in fee has an existing easement on it when you acquire it, you could enter this interest as an encumbrance. Power line easements, rights of way, and third party conservation easements are all examples of common encumbrances.

Like other assets, encumbrance assets have a 'Name', additional 'Type', 'Status', 'Date', and 'Summary' field. You can add additional types of encumbrances through Settings > List Items > Properties > Encumbrances (must be an administrator to access settings).

Consideration Amount is a quick way of noting the amount exchanged for the encumbrance. If you want to track that amount in your overall funding scheme, though, you'll need to use funding.  

Interested Parties is for adding people or organizations involved in the encumbrance. This could be the Grantor and Grantee, or simply 'Interested Party'. To change the default 'Interested Party' tag after you add the contact, click on the 'edit' button next to the contact and type in the additional tag in the 'Tags' field at the top.

Mapping the encumbrance

Since encumbrance assets have their own map layer, you can map each one individually.  This layer will then be available whenever you're viewing the property or stewardship site maps as the 'encumbrances' layer.  Mapping encumbrances is the same as mapping any other layer in Landscape, in that you need to be inside of the record that the map layer is referring to in order to edit it.  

The GIF below shows how to edit the encumbrance layer. Note that you can also import the layer from an existing shapefile instead of drawing it, or even copy it from another layer in Landscape. 

'What if we hold the encumbrance on ourselves?'

For example, what if you acquired a conservation easement first, but then later acquired the property in fee?

First and foremost, this should be represented by two different property records, since a property record is intended to represent your unique interest in a piece of land.  You could then place both property records in the same group to link them together.  Finally, from the fee property record you could enter an encumbrance asset to represent the easement you also hold on the land.

'How do we manage this encumbrance?'

For example, how could you enter communication records between you and the encumbrance holder?

If you need to capture details about the ongoing management of this interest beyond what the asset can capture, you may want to also enter it as its own record in the relevant stewardship site's 'Leases & Contracts' section.  Leases & Contracts have the ability to track communications, and can be more easily accessed by stewardship staff.

If an even greater level of detail is necessary, then you may want to create a separate property record with an interest of 'Partner Holding' and track all activity there and in the attached stewardship site.

Copying existing 'Leases & Contracts' to new encumbrances

If you were using stewardship site 'Leases & Contracts' to track these encumbrances but would like to copy these to the property record as well, you can easily create a new encumbrance asset from an existing Lease record:

Just navigate to the 'Use' tab of the relevant stewardship site, select the records you'd like to copy, and click on the lightning bolt icon.

A message will appear informing you that only certain details will be copied over.  This process copies the Name, Type, Start & End Date, Contacts (along with contact tags), Documents, Notes, and map data into the property record(s) that are attached to the stewardship site. This process only copies the data - it does not remove it from the stewardship site.