Land Surveys, A Need, Or Just More Insurance?
I was with a friend the other day, who happens to be a Realtor, when he got a call from someone. This was a very alarming phone call, and I could see it in his face as he listened to the other person on the phone. When he hung up the phone, I found out why. This person had purchased a piece of vacant land through my friend three years ago and had never had a survey done, and now we don’t know if she’s on the right piece of land after having built a home and done other improvements to the property.
We went and looked up the old file to see what had happened during the transaction, and soon realized that my friend had done everything right and more. This buyer had signed a form that we have stating they are not going to have a survey done and they hold the brokerage harmless, and she had initialed a particular line in the contract that had been written by the agent concerning this particular issue. There were other things in the file that showed that my friend had done his due diligence and had been very careful to point out the importance of having a survey done.
I know of other stories that are similar from this area, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to make the case for having a survey done. There is a lot of vacant land here, and when I take a listing I go out and try to find pins that match the plat map I’m looking at, but those pins are sometimes very hard to find, and many times have no markings on them. Sometimes I can measure from a pin that is marked, or a road, and figure “this is probably where it’s at”, but who really knows? Unless you have a survey done.
This is a little like buying tires. No one wants to buy tires right? But when you start seeing threads where tread used to be, you have a pretty good idea that you are about to spend some time walking if you don’t replace them right? A survey is not the place to cut corners when buying land either.
Consider a scenario with me: One day after a beautiful monsoon rain, the road grader comes along on his blade making the road a much nicer place for my hiney to ride on, and he’s cutting relief’s in the side of the road so that the next rain will have a place to drain. Now he’s one of the good guys around here, but he doesn’t notice that he’s just knocked down four pins and now they’re laying out there on the side of the road. The owner comes along a few weeks later (we’ll call him Duke) and see’s them laying there and says “oh well, I know where they’re supposed to be, I’ll just put them back”. A few years go by and Duke calls me and tells me he’d like to list two of the four pieces of land. So I go out and find the properties, everything looks in order, I sell one of the properties, and the buyer (we’ll call him Bo) says “nah, I can see the pins are marked, it would be a waste of money to have it surveyed”. A few years go by and Bo has built a home, drilled a well, installed a septic system, put up fencing all around his property, and sunk lots of money into his land. Bo likes his life here on The Mountain. Now comes Susie Q, and she buys the property next to Bo, but she has a survey done, and finds out she actually owns the property Bo is on.
During the ensuing court battle it’s revealed that Duke put the pins back almost exactly where they should have been, except that he accidentally switched two of them. RUH ROH, Houston, we have a problem.
After the dust settles, Susie sells her new home to Bo for a very low price of $350,000 with one stipulation, that he give her the land that she thought she was buying in the first place. Poor Bo, but it could have all been avoided if Bo would’ve just done a survey.
At this point I have to tell you, this has never happened to me, but I do have nightmares about it! I try my best to be comfortable about where I pound my sign, but don’t go by that sign, have a survey done, you’ll be glad you did.
Anybody else have a story to tell along these lines? Leave it in the comments section, I’d love to hear it.
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I’ve been surveying land for nearly 25 years and I’ve seen all kinds of problems resulting from, either lack of surveying or misinterpretation of monuments (or relying on moved and distrubed markers).
Survey and survey often, that’s what I recommend. People need to understand that the survey is only good the day it’s done; in that, later deeds and surveys, or when monuments get destroyed or moved, require an update to verify the boundaries. When compared to the price of land and your investment in improvements to the land, an accurate survey, or update, is a small price to pay for the peace of mind it provides.
Well said Eric. Thanks for the comment