Sorry Milkman, didn't mean to tread on your profession, seems I touched a nerve. Just simply stated an opinion on what has worked for me in the past. I have 7 rental properties, of which two, the bank helped me out. I wasn't suggesting all lawyers are worthless, sorry you took offense, was just suggesting using a lender is a "safer" transaction versus cash when dealing with a financially unstable seller and for a $20K property would be cheaper than using a lawyer to do the same due diligence.
Say what you want about the banking crisis, but it had nothing to do with the bank's ability to do due diligence on liens and title issues that may exist. Personally, I blame the Community Reinvestment Act, specifically the legislative changes made to it in 1992 and 1995 along with Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that allowed commercial and investment banks to consolidate, but I digress...
To avoid a complete hijack, back to the OP...first, let me say that I am not a lawyer and anything I say should not be construed as legal advice...
I have two experiences similar to your scenarios that you pose. First, my current residence is on 50 acres that is "land locked", so I am in the same scenario as your neighbors. There are several things that I learned during that purchase, one very important thing I learned from the
bank (sorry, couldn't resist) with regards to easements. When I purchased the land, my neighbor had agreed to allow me an easement to use the current road that he had already established. To me, it was the very definition of what an easement was for, didn't think anything of it. However, it was my bank that suggested that I get the easement deeded into my property as that apparently is the only way to assure it is permanent. In other words the neighbor could have potentially revoked the easement at any point in the future. Obviously, he didn't want to deed me the road as my easement, but he agreed to deed me an easement down the fenceline of his property. It would be very difficult to build a road where the easement that was deeded is, but at least I never run the risk of being permanently "land locked" by relying on the kindness of my neighbor. As it stands the neighbor and I just share the road that was in place and I use that as my "unofficial" easement. One thing I also learned, and I have no idea of Wyoming law, and am not a lawyer, but my understanding is an easement can be implied. If your neighbors have been using that road for years and years to access their property, it may be that by law, it is already considered an easement. It may also be true that because they already have an official easement that it is impossible to have an implied easement, I don't know, but if it is already considered an implied easement it probably wouldn't hurt to have them spend the money on the road
With the fence line I don't have a direct correlation, but I once bought some rental property on 3 acres, in the back corner was a 1 acre pond. Turns out that pond resulted in a boundry dispute when we did the survey. The pond was in the corner of three properties. All three landowner's surveys showed the pond as part of their property. My bank handled eveything for me so I'm a little sketchy on the details as it was several years ago, but I think they were able to go to the county tax office and find evidence of historical tax records that the landowner I was purchasing from had been the one paying the taxes on that parcel of land, armed with that evidence the other owners conceded the point. I think it also had something to do with registered versus unregistered surveys, I'm not sure why you would get a survey and not register it but apparently people do. And as I recall the registered surveys pull more weight in a dispute. So you might check that the survey of the property in question is registered. By the way, the bank settled the property dispute for me at no extra charge and I ended up getting the pond. Not sure what a lawyer would charge for that?
I would suggest getting a real estate lawyer to look at everything (which I am not); whatever you do, do not go to a bank that specializes in rural real estate, as they will have never dealt with easements or property line disputes and would just screw everything up and have no idea what actions should be taken to get it straightened out
But going back to the original question, in my novice, non-lawyer, non-cpa, opinion I still don't think you need an llc...I have 7 llc's, one for each rental property, they don't really do anything for me tax wise, it is strictly a liability thing