Okay, so the real estate course that I have is for Massachusetts. And this is a quick recap for my visual learners; so they can have a better understanding as to what the definitions are that they need to understand for their real estate license.
The words that some of them are confused about are what fall under water rights, and what’s the differences in how they’re used.
So, the first word that you have to remember, is “ass-ession”, or “access-ion,” depending on where you come from. accession is the addition of property or land. So, I’m going to use a reference for the beach, the water next to a house, right? So, if you own a piece of property, how would you get that addition? So, if you own this piece of property, there’s a number of ways that you would add land next to the water. Two terms fall underneath that. The first one is accretion. And the second one is reliction. Now, most would understand that you could add land, to a property by construction, by mechanical, by human methods. The other two ways would be by nature, the first one would be reliction. Now, this is the receding of water away from the land, the water is withdrawing and increasing the land that is available to the homeowner. The other method would be accretion. Accretion, is by the gradual process of water, pushing material, or mostly soil to the land. And this material is called alluvion. That’s the material that’s being added by the process of accretion. Now, what’s the flip side of what those two words were on top of accession? So, accession is the addition of land. Now, we have the removal of land. And those two words of the removal would be erosion, which almost everybody knows. Avulsion. Avulsion is the sudden loss of land just stripped away from the property owner; by a number of reasons. And erosion is the subtle, slow process. It’s not instant. Some people confuse those two terms.
I hope this helped! If you have any other real estate questions, by all means, put in the comments below. I’d be happy to answer those questions.