Buying a Jonesboro Home on a Private Road: What to Check

You found the house. It sits back off the highway on a quiet gravel lane, and the drive in is half the reason you love it.

Then your lender asks a question nobody prepared you for: how is this property legally accessed, and who is responsible for keeping that road passable?

This comes up constantly across Craighead, Greene, and Poinsett counties. A lot of Northeast Arkansas homes sit on lanes that were cut when a family split a farm, or on shared drives that two or three neighbors have quietly taken turns grading for twenty years. Trenton Hoggard and Tim Ray have worked enough of these deals to know that the road is almost never the problem. The paperwork behind the road is. If you are early in the process, our guide to buying a home in Northeast Arkansas covers the wider timeline; this post is about the one issue that can quietly stall a rural closing.

What Counts as a Private Road in Northeast Arkansas

A road is public when a government body has formally accepted it and maintains it. In practice that means the City of Jonesboro, the Arkansas Department of Transportation, or the county judge's road department.

Everything else is private, even if it looks official. Around here that includes:

• A gravel lane serving three or four houses carved out of one original tract
• A shared driveway split between two homes, sometimes with no visible line between them
• A subdivision street that was built but never formally accepted by the city or county
• A farm lane that has become the everyday access for a house built on the back of the property
• A road that is maintained by a property owners association rather than a government

Here is the part that catches buyers off guard. The county grading a road once as a favor, or years ago, does not make it a county road. If it was never accepted into the county system, it is private, and it is yours and your neighbors' problem to keep up.

So the first question is not whether the road is nice. It is whether the road is legally yours to use.

Step One: Confirm Your Access Is Recorded

Permission is not access. If the neighbor lets you drive across their land because they always have, that is a courtesy, and courtesies end when the land sells or the family changes.

What you need is a recorded easement: a document filed in the Craighead County Circuit Clerk's office that gives the owners of your parcel a legal right to cross a specific strip of someone else's land, forever, regardless of who owns either property later.

Ask your title company to confirm three things in writing:

• An access easement exists and is recorded in the county land records
• It runs with the land, meaning it binds and benefits future owners, not just the current ones
• Its described route actually matches the road you drove in on

That third one matters more than people expect. Easements written decades ago sometimes describe a route that has since been moved around a wet spot, a fence line, or a new shop building. The deed says one thing, the gravel says another, and nobody notices until a survey is ordered.

This is also where a boundary survey earns its cost. Our post on whether you need a survey to buy a home in Jonesboro walks through when we push for one, and access questions are near the top of that list.

What Your Lender Will Require

Financing is usually what forces this conversation into the open. Every major loan program cares about access, and they care in slightly different ways.

Conventional loans

Fannie Mae's guidelines state that a property must be readily accessible by roads that meet local standards, and that a property not readily accessible that way is not eligible. For a home on a privately owned and maintained street, the guidelines call for an adequate, legally enforceable agreement or covenant for maintenance of the street, recorded in the county land records, that spells out who pays for repairs and in what share, what happens if someone does not pay, and how long the agreement lasts. You can read the language yourself in the Fannie Mae Selling Guide site section.

There is a meaningful escape valve. If a state has its own statute assigning maintenance responsibility among private road owners, no separate agreement is required. And if there is no qualifying agreement at all, the guidelines still allow the lender to sell the loan, as long as the lender agrees to indemnify Fannie Mae for losses tied to the road. That second path is a lender business decision, not a right. Some will take it. Many will not.

Arkansas has not adopted the kind of statute that some states use to automatically split private road costs when nothing is in writing. Practically speaking, that means what is recorded controls, and if nothing is recorded, there is a gap. Confirm your specific situation with a real estate attorney rather than assuming.

FHA loans

FHA is focused on protected access. Private streets and shared driveways need to be covered by a permanent recorded easement, or be owned and maintained by a homeowners association. FHA also wants an all-weather surface, meaning emergency vehicles and ordinary passenger cars can get through year round. The current requirements live in the HUD Single Family Housing Policy Handbook 4000.1.

Note the difference from conventional: FHA leans on the recorded easement rather than on a maintenance agreement. That is a real distinction, and it occasionally means an FHA buyer can close on a property where a conventional buyer stalled.

USDA and VA loans

USDA matters a lot here, because much of Craighead County outside the Jonesboro city limits is in eligible territory, and USDA properties are exactly the ones sitting on gravel. USDA also expects direct access from a public or private road, protected access when that road is private, and an all-weather surface.

The important practical point across all of these programs: individual lenders can be stricter than the program. A loan officer who has been burned before may want a recorded maintenance agreement even when the agency does not demand one. Ask early, in writing, before you spend money on an inspection.

Road Maintenance Agreements: What a Good One Says

If a maintenance agreement exists, read it. If one does not exist, you and the seller may need to create one before closing, which takes time and neighbor cooperation.

A workable agreement answers plain questions:

• Who is covered, described by parcel rather than by name, so it survives a sale
• How costs are divided, whether evenly, by frontage, or by distance traveled
• What triggers spending, such as routine grading and gravel versus a washed-out culvert
• How decisions get made when owners disagree, including who can authorize work
• What happens when someone refuses to pay their share
• That it is perpetual and binding on future owners
• That it is recorded, not sitting in a drawer

If the road is handled by a property owners association instead, ask for the dues amount and the last few years of minutes or financials. One local note worth flagging: HOA dues in the Jonesboro area typically run about $100 to $300 per year, not per month. National guides quote monthly figures in the hundreds, and that framing is simply wrong for our market. Even so, a small annual assessment may not cover a serious road repair, so ask what happens when the association needs more than it collects.

When There Is No Agreement at All

This is the most common scenario we see on older NEA lanes. There is a recorded easement, or at least a usable one, and absolutely nothing in writing about upkeep.

You have a few realistic paths:

• Get one signed before closing. Clean, but it requires every affected owner to cooperate on your timeline. Some will. Some will not answer the door.
• Switch loan programs. If a maintenance agreement is the only sticking point, a program that emphasizes recorded easement over written upkeep terms may solve it.
• Ask the lender for an exception. Sometimes available on conventional financing, never guaranteed, and worth asking about before you are three weeks in.
• Price the risk in. Decide what an unmaintained road is worth to you, and negotiate accordingly.
• Walk. Sometimes the right answer, especially if a neighbor is openly hostile about the road.

Talk to the neighbors before you decide. Five minutes at a mailbox will tell you more about how that road actually gets maintained than any document will. Ask who calls the gravel truck, how often, and what everyone paid last time.

If the Property Is Truly Landlocked

Occasionally a parcel has no recorded legal access at all. The house has been reached the same way for forty years, but nothing on paper protects it.

Arkansas does provide a remedy. Under Arkansas Code 27-66-401, an owner whose land is situated so that a road across a neighbor's property is necessary to reach a public road can petition the county court to have one laid out, after giving the neighbor twenty days' written notice that includes what the owner is offering to pay. If the case proceeds, the court appoints viewers, sets an evidentiary hearing, and requires the petitioner to deposit funds covering the viewers' fees, the survey, notice costs, and damages to the neighbor's property.

Read that again as a buyer. It is a court process with a filing, a waiting period, a hearing date no sooner than sixty days out, and money you put up front. It is a solution, not a shortcut, and it is not something to start after you are under contract with a closing date.

If a property has no recorded access, treat that as a reason to slow down and get an attorney involved before you write, not after.

How This Affects the Appraisal and Your Resale

Appraisers are instructed to comment on easements, access, and any condition that could hurt marketability, and to reflect it in value. Access problems can show up as a condition on the appraisal, which becomes a condition on your loan.

Pricing these homes is also harder than pricing a house in a Jonesboro subdivision. In our market, comparable sales usually need to come from the last 90 to 180 days because volume is lower here than in metro areas, and for acreage or private-lane properties we often have to reach further than that to find anything genuinely similar. Fewer comps means a wider range of reasonable opinions about value, which is exactly why a local agent matters more on these than on a tract home.

Then think about the day you sell. Every financed buyer behind you will run into the same access review you are running into now. A clean recorded easement and a recorded maintenance agreement are not paperwork chores. They are what keeps your buyer pool wide in five years.

Access issues frequently show up as exceptions on the title commitment too, which is worth understanding before you get to the closing table. Our overview of title insurance for Jonesboro buyers explains how those exceptions work and what they do and do not cover.

What to Do Before You Write the Offer

A short list we run with buyers looking at rural homes on acreage around Northeast Arkansas:

• Ask the listing agent directly whether the road is public or private, and get the answer in writing
• Ask whether a recorded easement and a recorded maintenance agreement exist, and request copies
• Send both documents to your loan officer before you spend money on inspections
• Drive the road after a hard rain if you possibly can
• Ask who plows, grades, and hauls gravel, and what it has cost recently
• Confirm that delivery, trash, mail, and school bus service actually reach the property
• Check whether a locked gate, cattle guard, or seasonal creek crossing sits between the house and the county road

On the offer itself, a couple of NEA specifics are worth knowing. The large majority of deals in our market do not include earnest money at all. When buyers do put earnest money down, $1,000 is the most common figure, and the highest we typically see, around $5,000, is reserved for luxury transactions at roughly $500,000 and up. Those are observed patterns rather than rules, and every deal is negotiated, so do not assume the national guidance about depositing one to two percent of the purchase price applies in Jonesboro. It does not.

Budget for inspection realistically as well. A standard single-family inspection in this area generally runs $500 to $1,000, and larger homes, crawlspaces, or add-on services such as well, septic, or sewer scope push that toward $800 to $1,200 or more. On a rural property you are more likely to need those add-ons, not less. And plan on a termite letter for almost any financed purchase in Arkansas, since the main exceptions are an in-house bank loan or paying cash.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can I get a mortgage on a home with a shared driveway in Jonesboro?

Usually yes, as long as your right to use the driveway is protected by a recorded easement. Conventional financing may also want a recorded maintenance agreement. Get copies of both documents to your loan officer before you order an inspection.

Q: Who is responsible for repairing a private road in Arkansas?

Whoever the recorded agreement or covenant says is responsible. Arkansas has not adopted a statute that automatically divides those costs when nothing is written down, so an unrecorded, informal arrangement can leave real gaps. A real estate attorney can review your specific documents.

Q: Will the county take over a private road so I do not have to maintain it?

Rarely, and never on your closing timeline. Acceptance into a county road system is a formal decision, and roads generally have to meet county standards first. Buy the property assuming the road stays private.

Q: Does a private road lower a home's value in Northeast Arkansas?

Not automatically. Plenty of buyers here specifically want the privacy. What hurts value is unclear access or an unmaintained surface, because both shrink the pool of buyers who can finance the home later.

The Short Version

Private roads are normal in Northeast Arkansas. They are not a red flag. They are a diligence item, and they belong at the front of your process rather than three weeks into a contract.

Verify the easement is recorded. Find out who maintains the road and whether that duty is written down. Get those documents in front of your lender early. If the answers come back thin, you still have options, but you need the time to use them.

We work these properties across Jonesboro and the surrounding NEA communities regularly, and the deals that go smoothly are almost always the ones where somebody asked about the road on the first showing.

For perspective on who you are working with: NEA Realtor Group, led by Trenton Hoggard and Tim Ray, holds 5-star reviews and is the #1 real estate team in the Northeast Arkansas MLS by production.

For broader context on where the market sits right now, the 30-year fixed mortgage averaged 6.71% in the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week of September 3, 2026, up from 6.66% the prior week and 6.50% a year earlier. National Association of REALTORS research tracks the national sales picture, and Redfin's Jonesboro market page put the local median sale price at $234,882 for the three months ending July 2026, up 0.8% year over year, with homes going pending in a median of 55 days versus 66 days a year ago.