Then (as I indicated above) you have a good indication it may be worth hiring a professional to sort things out. But in the tolerably common case where they do agree (and especially when you find the pins), you can have some confidence that you now know where the line really is. By presenting this evidence you might even be able to convince a cantankerous neighbor (provided he’s less than 100% bloody-minded).
It’s hard for me to see why it would be a bad idea to obtain the deeds and see what they say, especially when this is nearly always inexpensive and easy to do. Indeed, I’d say it’s kind of basic to have copies not only of the deeds to property you own, but to all adjacent parcels as well, and to be aware of where these do and don’t agree.
I know that it happened with a piece of property I bought about a year ago. I was able to resolve the issue by obtaining all the old deeds (back to 1855, when all property near me was part of a very large farm), including those of the adjacent parcels. The description had been mis-transcribed when the property was sold around 1920, and the error was copied verbatim into three subsequent deeds. I’m happy to say that it has now been corrected.
Actually, that’s a very good idea, but once more, sometimes even deeds that are seemingly in agreement may have errors that are not readily apparent to the lay person as illustrated in my third example which I’ll repost below. Furthermore, encroachments and dealing with them can be very costly. A cinderblock wall for instance is going to likely cost more than a legal survey. (Hell, you paid your real estate agent more than you’ll likely pay a surveyor and their liability doesn’t continue much beyond the finalization of the transaction.) Your neighbor or possibly the party that someday buys your neighbor’s property may or may not be able to force you to move your wall when it is discovered to be several inches over the property line into their property. I haven’t even mentioned any other possible improvements or set back requirements. I guess it all comes down to what you consider acceptable risk. Ya payz yer moneyz (or not) and ya takez yer chancez.
Frankly, I’d like to see laws making a legal, recorded survey be required any time any improvement is made to a piece of property, even for something as simple as fence or wall lines. This would forestall many potential problems, but isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
The subdivision in which this dispute is taking place is found to have errors in the original survey that set the monumentation establishing it. Even a metes and bounds description (assuming your deeds have this, not all do) isn’t going to reveal that, only a retracement of the original establishing survey will. As a result of this new survey the block you and your difficult neighbor live on is found to be 1 and 1/2 feet short of the length shown in the tract map. Your deed says you have 50 feet of frontage. How much frontage do you actually have, less? More?
Another way to look at it, a legal, recorded and monumented survey is like insurance. When everything is fat and happy and you are getting along with your neighbor, it seems useless and hardly worth the price and effort. However, when the need arises I guarantee you’ll be glad you had it done. 'Nuff said.
No doubt many surveyors would agree. But there are some obvious drawbacks to a scheme that effectively imposes a surcharge of $800 or so whenever anyone wants to put up a fence.
The more common approach of resorting to surveys only when necessary will leave some residual problems, but on balance looks to be much less costly.
True. And it’s wise to consider both the risk of a loss and its cost when deciding what insurance to buy. Putting up a $1000 fence, you’d be rather foolish to spend $800 to avoid a 5% chance that you’d later have to move it. Putting up a $50k building, you’d be foolish not to.
Glad that worked out for you, but deeds do not always help. A neighbor told me that the old alleyway between my place and 2nd neighbor had been vacated to my property and I was paying taxes on it, but the 2nd neighbor had put up a fence taking it. I went and checked the county engineer. The plat map showed that there was no alley there. Ever.
The plat map also showd that the 2nd neighbor owned 164 ft. from the road at the north end of his property to my property line. And my property goes 150 ft. further south to the next road. The two plots right next to us to the west start and stop at the same roads, but their properties are each 148 ft. Straight roads, straight property lines, 16 ft difference.
The county engineer started looking at older plat books. All of them showed the same thing, back to the earliest he had, 1886 I think. So he pulled the actual deed to my place. Which said that my property lines were as shown for my plat number in the plat book. :smack:
I guess I should go back up to the engineers office sometime and see if they have figured things out yet.
I think the generic term is “monument,” as Mr. Owl has indicated. They are often steel or iron pins, sometimes anchored in concrete. Stone posts seem to have been popular in the past in some areas. Certain old surveys will make reference to such things as the stumps of old trees (of limited value 100 years later).
A typical line might be described as “Beginning at an iron pin near Valley Road and adjacent to lands now or formerly of Fred Smith, thence North 40.5 degrees West 12 rods to an iron pin.”
An interesting thing I’ve noted is that the alignment of these lines is always off by a certain amount. The reason is the movement of the earth’s magnetic pole - they are referenced to magnetic north, which changes over time. You can estimate the age of a survey by measuring the current error and checking the rate of magnetic drift in your area (though if you live in an area where it’s really slow, accuracy may not be great).
It’s going to depend upon the requirements that the state, county or sometimes municipality have or had in place at the time the survey was conducted. In California we don’t even refer to pins, but more often talk about property or lot corners. Currently, the law here requires the setting of “durable monuments.” I’m skipping over some of the minutia, but my company satisfies that requirement by one or a combination of the following, driving into the ground a length of iron pipe and then cementing into it a brass tag engraved with the surveyor’s license number, affixing that same tag unto concrete sidewalks, curbs or walls, or driving a length of rebar into the ground and affixing a metal cap engraved with the surveyor’s license number.
As I referenced above, the requirements over the years have changed. Also a surveyor’s interpretation of the requirements can be lacking. When surveying a lot in an older subdivision sometimes the only physical evidence we will find is a buried piece of lumber often deteriorated to the point of being nearly unrecognizable as such. However, it can still be considered confirming evidence. I wouldn’t build a fence or wall based on it, but I guess there are others who would.
Okay, joke time.
George Washington after finishing the survey for a farmer’s piece of land presented his bill for $100. The farmer became instantly irate over a price he thought outrageous for the short time he saw the survey party working to set four pins. Washington, took back the bill and rewrote it. He then presented the following. Cost to set four pins @ $0.25 each… $1.00. Cost of knowledge as to where to set four pins… $99.00.
Q: What do surveyors call Mt. Rushmore?
A: Three surveyors and the other guy.
Thanks again for the all the replies…I had no idea that surveying was so complicated. You guys must make good money…at least you should imo.
Let me describe my neighborhood more because I have a question that I want to ask so as to compare your answer to what the local survey gods here will tell me. I just want to have a check against what they say and also so that I will have a little knowledge myself.
Ok so my ‘hood was built around the early 1950s. On my block and all the blocks around me the houses are oriented north-south. I have a neighbor directly to the East and directly to the West. Each house is about 15’ apart. There is a house to the north of me (behind my house) but that house is on the other side of the alley.
My neighbor insists that he owns one foot of my lawn so he and the rest of his family drive and park their vehicles on that foot of lawn (that I mow and maintain). His mortgage survey and my mortgage survey even seem to agree with his claim, and it appears that I “own” a foot of property of my other neighbor’s lawn (except I don’t drive or park on her grass). So every Spring I have a disgusting mud-pit to deal with.
Why is this situation like this? I don’t get how this works…what’s the sense of having a foot of property that looks like it is mine…actually belong to my neighbor?
Does any surveyor know why this is like that, and what are the chances that a “pin survey” would show that this is a mistake? I am guessing there is a very small chance if any at all because of the age of the subdivision.
Well… define ‘mistake’. The surveyors at the time had the equipment they had - no GPS, no laser distance measurers, no automatic levels - heck, only had adding machines, slide rules, and trigonometry tables for doing the calculations. For measuring distances, they had steel chains that had to be held just so, and corrected and calibrated just so. Write the results by hand into a book with hopefully decent handwriting that will still be legible for posterity.
So, they measured a baseline half a mile long (that would be 2640 feet), and showed it as 2640.00 feet on the tract plat. Thing is, modern measurements make it out to be 2638.502 feet. It might be easy enough to come up with a fair adjustment if the tract was perfectly rectangular and all the lots were set up to be the same size… but that scarcely ever happens. There are rules for how to figure a fair adjustment, but they’re not always “easy”.
Oh, and it turns out that the tract surveyors missed one of the notes from the original farm lot subdivision. For that farm lot, the 1850 survey set one of the farm lot pins 10 feet away from its ‘true’ location because at the time, there was a huge old oak tree (since blown over and gone) right at the true location. The offset was noted in the farm lot plat, but not clearly enough. The goof was not picked up until a squabble in the next tract over caused that tract to be resurveyed in 1960. Everyone ‘knows’ about the 1960 survey, but there’s never been enough reason to apply it to the tract you’re living in - until you finally get angry enough with your neighbors to truly want to tell them to “get off your lawn”.
These are ‘what ifs’ to demonstrate a point or two.
I mean mistake as in…someone goofed up in 1950. I guess anything is possible, but I won’t find out until I get a survey.
Let’s say the survey actually shows that my neighbor’s garage has been encroaching on my lot. Well it’s been there since before I or he even bought and moved into our respective homes. I don’t see how I would be able to do anything about it. I think there is some kind of law that says if a person takes care or uses a chunk of land that land becomes theirs after a certain time period…so other than waving a survey document in his face what could I really do with a survey? He could always dispute it and then the next thing you know the lawyers get to buy a new boat…
Well, my grandfather had an extensive garden, and it abutted his neighbor to the west’s garage. In fact, when said neighbor needed to take out a mortgage for home remodeling, the survey indicated that the corner of the garage was across the property line. So grandpa and the neighbor, being fairly good friends, agreed on a property swap – grandpa sold him a triangular parcel surrounding his garage and sufficient to give him the proper setback, and in exchange he deeded over an equivalent square footage of land behind the garage. Then they proceeded to completely ignore who actually owned what, and grandpa continued to garden on the land he’d sold to the neighbor, while the neighbor stored his boat on the land that he’d sold to grandpa – but they both made sure that their heirs knew of the transaction, because what they ‘officially’ owned by dee now differed from what it looked like they owned by the fence around the garden separating the two parcels.
I’m trying to picture exactly what you are describing, but it seems to me mainly to be a “set-off” issue related to zoning.
Say every lot on your street is 50’ wide. If you want to install a driveway or sidewalk on your property, local zoning laws likely prohibit you from placing it immediately abutting the property line. (In my town any impermeable surface has to be 1’ inside the line.) So at some point in time your neighbor installed his driveway 1’ inside his property. The 1’ on your side of his driveway remains his property, although it adjoins your lawn, and is closer to your house than his, such that to many observers it appears to be your property. But it isn’t. And he retains the right to park or drive his vehicles, plant or maintain it as he wishes.
I believe the reasons are to prevent construction of buildings or pavement from infringing upon the neighbor’s property, either physically or through affecting water runoff.
IME in most areas like this folk tend to be flexible as to maintenance such as mowing and raking. Each neighbor tends to maintain the little strip that is actually their neighbor’s.
You know that makes perfect sense…and I would have to agree. I suppose there is nothing that I can do. Sure I can get a survey with the hope that my property should be shifted over some, but that would be a very small chance…and likely end up in court. I guess I just have to grin and bear it. All these years I have been thinking that since it was ME mowing that grass and throwing down new dirt and seed it was my property.
The link Astro provided above has some very good definitions of various types of surveys. Let me quote what it has to say about mortgage surveys.
The truth is among many land surveyors mortgage surveys are considered something of a joke. They basically consist of someone, often not a land surveyor, driving to the property and sometimes not even getting out of their vehicle. All they really determine is whether or not there is a house and garage on the property and that they don’t appear to be over the apparent property lines. They might get out a wheel to check to see if the dimensions of the property are approximately correct and they might check on the various set backs required and judge whether they look right. It’s likely that none of these measurements meet survey standards. Then again, what do you expect for a couple hundred dollars? Once more, and I’m feeling like a broken record here, the laws regarding the different types of surveys vary widely from place to place. Some are very stringent while others are very lax.
Maniaman,
“Why a situation like this?” It could be any number of things and may never be known exactly. Your surveyor should make every effort to gather as much information regarding the original survey and some clues may be found pointing to the causes, but the precise reason probably won’t ever be determined.
“so other than waving a survey document in his face what could I really do with a survey?” As Xema indicates, the courts are ultimately where these disputes are resolved if the parties can’t otherwise agree. This is the reason I always suggest first talking with your neighbor and trying to resolve the problem between you before calling in the professionals. Perhaps you could split the cost of a surveyor coming out and determining the line separating the two of you. Trying to keep it out of the courts should be paramount in everyone’s mind. But as it seems so often, people egos tend to come into play very quickly. As somewhat of an aside, it also seems from my experience that the more money the two parties have, the more likely they are to squabble over mere tenths of a foot. Who was it that said “Good fences make good neighbors?”
Surveying is far more complicated that the public perceives it to be. Most states require a four year degree in survey and then a licensing exam. Sorry, I should say exams as there are two of them. One for LSIT (Licensed Surveyor in Training) and one for the LS (Licensed Surveyor), in some states referred to as a PLS (Professional Land Surveyor) or even RLS (Registered Land Surveyor) Each of these exams is typically 8 hours long, the passing rate of which is frequently rather low. Like the state bar, some people take the exam for years before finally passing.
Honestly, the financial returns are less than might be expected. One reason is that there are far too many people out there that think they are capable of determining their or even another’s property lines based solely on readily accessible information (deeds) and then making gross measurements (tape measure.) They don’t take into account all the other variables that come into play when a land surveyor renders their professional opinion. As such, many don’t think a surveyor deserves a reasonable rate of return on professional services. Make no doubt about it land surveying is a profession, one akin to the classic professions, (that is medicine, the law, the clergy and education.) Its relationship to these other professions is in the amount of public trust invested in the land surveyor. The surveyor doesn’t really go out and determine his client’s boundaries, but rather the boundaries of the ad-joiners of the client. The liability of this (surveyors carry professional liability insurance) is rather great. Wouldn’t you agree? Oops, how did this soapbox get here?
In actuality, I’ve always figured most surveyors were engineering students that decided they didn’t want to be inside all day. Should have stayed the course and gotten that civil dammit.
Unfortunately it’s no longer in print, but if you can find a copy of Surveying Your Land by Charles E. Lawson you may find it interesting reading. It’s a short book written by a PLS for the public. It explains in mostly non-technical language what the average person would want to know about surveys, deeds and title searches. There are used copies available on line, but are priced rather high for a paperback book. Looking around on the net I did come across this brief article on 10 Tips on Hiring a Professional Land Surveyor. The information is good.
Glad I was able to help with the answer - even if it wasn’t the one you wished for. There are some things you could do if this really bothers you.
Specifically, you could look at landscaping options which would more clearly set off your nicely groomed property from the strip adjoining his driveway. 2 thoughts immediately come to mind.
-Depending on how the properties are situated, you could possibly install a fence immediately inside of the property line. You’d have to check zoning, but in general post holes are dug a few inches inside of the property line, to ensure that the permanent portion of the fence - the concrete and posts - do not encroach upon the neighbor’s property. Then the nailed on sections of the fence can be very close to or right on the property line. The fence could be either a solid privacy type that actually blocks your view of this strip that bothers you, or it could be more decorative, creating more of an “implied” boundary. But a fence would clearly convey what is yours as opposed to his, and he would be responsible for maintaining (or not) the strip between your fence and the driveway.
-Less invasive than a fence would be some sort of plantings. Again, the intent would be the same, to create at least an implied distinction between the properties. You could plant a row of hedges on your side of the property line. This could be tricky, tho, as you would want to keep them from spreading way onto the neighbor’s lot in which case he could hack them back to the property line. And you don’t want to plant something that will require that you go onto his land to maintain it - pruning and such. Another option might be a planting bed. Perhaps you could line it with rocks on the side closest to the property line, which would delineate the bed as well as discourage them from driving over your plantings.
But in the vast majority of cases I suspect that your approach of grinning and bearing it is likely the best recourse. If this is the worst thing between you and your neighbors, you’re doing okay.
