Yes, this is an easy and inexpensive way to approximate your property boundaries. If you’re lucky, the maps will identify the corners with notations on them (eg “iron pin found” with an arrow pointing to the exact location of the iron pin, plus any offset if any). If you’re VERY lucky, you’ll find the iron pin (or other marker) in the ground.
Another way to do it on the cheap is to hire a licensed land surveyor to find and mark the property corners. If you don’t need the property mapped, don’t ask for it and don’t ask for measurements, either. That will save the surveyor some time and you some money. Assuming the boundaries are straight lines, it’s easy enough to visualize or even mark with ribbon or string. Rather than going to the Yellow Pages to find a surveyor (hey, I’m old!), try asking at the local community college in their engineering department and offer them a field study for extra credit.
Yeah. Our lots have metal pipes in the back corners, and crosses scratched into the sidewalks out front. I see the sidewalk mark every week when I mow my lawn and am deciding where to stop. More than once I’ve found the back pipes by just poking around with a shovel. In such a situation, you can stretch a string from front to back and get a darned good idea. Just plant the posts 6” on your side of that line and you can be pretty confident.
But I understand not all places are marked similarly.
I think a lot of those markers get waylaid by residents who don’t know any better. They’re digging around in their yard and come across a pin, nail, or pipe and think, “Hmmf. What the hell is this, and how did it get here?” Then dig it up and toss it. Many (most?) of the survey markers in American residential developments have no identifying markings on them, so they could be confused with construction debris left behind.
When I did my survey mentioned upthread we found one corner was about 5 feet from what the neighbor on that side had told me was the official corner marker. Turns out his “corner marker” was a 5 foot long bent hunk of 3/8" rebar, probably left over from pouring his or my foundation.
But one end was sticking out of the ground a few inches when he moved in and on that basis he decided it’s our corner marker. Oops. I have no doubt it was an honest mistake, but it sure was an ignorant one.
I’m considering a fence to shield from view a shitty yard, but I want to allow wildlife critters the ability to amble about freely like turtles, bunnies and squirrels. So I’m thinking of leaving a gap at the bottom. I know turtles and gators can climb chain link fences but can gophers and foxes? Right now my yard is a wildlife corridor but a solid fence would put a damper on their movement.
Be careful, you may want to contact a real estate attorney about that, because you could end up with an “adverse possession” situation down the road if you don’t document the encroachment. The same goes for a fence line.
That sort of price is more in line with surveying the full boundary, topography, all buildings, structures, paving, trees, planting beds, and utilities. Also for a decent (like 1+ acre) property. It’s not crazy high for that sort of work though. Even boundary surveys are pushing over $1,000 in some cases nowadays.
The term for this is “boundary survey.” It’s just that, they will locate the property boundaries and mark any corners as noted by Dinsdale below. However they won’t locate anything else, so you won’t have any other reference points to go off of, like the building, or edges of pavement, or anything else. That said, they are usually required to install corner pins if they can’t find existing ones, and for your own reference they should put in stakes and/or flags so you can see them before they inevitably get buried. Nowadays pins in dirt or grass have big orange heads, like 1 or 1 1/2" in diameter, so they’re easier to find.
The scratches may or may not be actual corners. If they are actual corners then they should also have a metal pin in them. Otherwise they may just be marking an imaginary extension line from the actual corner pin to make it easier to find.
I designed a porch addition for a friend a couple years ago, and they had a boundary survey from a couple years before that. Since it didn’t locate the house, I had to play surveyor even though my background is architecture. Fortunately the lot was a rectangle and so was the house. They also uncovered the pins in the yard that the grass had grown over. I don’t remember if there were scratches in the sidewalk (sometimes they’re on the curb at the street), but the pins themselves were about a foot into the grass from the sidewalk. This let me locate the house and show that the addition would meet the property line setbacks. It was kind of a fun exercise, but only because their property was very normative, and also mostly flat.
So tell me about the problems that could arise if no survey is done. My yard is steeply sloped and practically unusable, so I don’t really care if the fence happens to end up a foot or two over my property line. I guess the problem could arise if I ever sell the house? But a buyer is going to notice the problem only if they do their own survey before buying the house, right? In my experience with buying and selling about a half dozen houses, that has never happened. Do home buyers ever really do that? What other real issues might affect me? How is the situation different from the fact that if the neighbor builds the fence offset to his side, it will be several feet over HIS property line?
Have you looked into the permitting process for fences in your city/town/village? Does permitting process exist? The more city-fied of a place you’re in, the more likely all of this info will be part of the permit. I live in a city of 12k and had to submit plans and drawings for my permit, which included boundary lines.
A title search is typically required as part of a home sale. If you don’t remember doing it yourself, it’s probably because it was included as part of the title search or something like that.
The neighbor still owns the property between his fence and the property line. The problem comes if you were to think you owned the property up to his fence line. If you do things like build a shed, BBQ, pool, etc. over his property line, that’s a problem. The neighbor can force you to remove your structures from his property. If the neighbor never says anything, then you could make a claim for adverse possession. Maintenance of the strip between the fence and property line can also create legal issues. If you maintain that strip as if you owned it, such as planting landscaping, then you may be able to claim ownership under adverse possession.
The lot next door to mine was purchased by evil developer guy. (There are decent developers in town. This guy isn’t one of them.) He wanted to build a giant house on a level lot. Both his lot and mine are on a hill, with a substantial rise from front to back. I hired a surveyor to find the boundaries and to “put lots of yellow flags along the border to this property”. (I emphasized that to the point that he asked if I wanted the other sides marked at all. )
That survey bought me ten feet of land in the backyard, that didn’t get blasted away, because the blasting team asked me about the yellow flags – developer guy had told them to go a lot further. In the front, the line was pretty much exactly where we all assumed it was. But it turned out that developer guy poured a foundation that was 6 feet closer to the border than zoning allowed. I measured from the yellow flags (that’s typical around here, they only last a few months, but that was enough) to the foundation, and pointed this out to developer-guy. He gave me a very sour look, but a few days later he had a surveyor come out, and then he poured a new foundation 6 feet further back, where it belonged.
Anyway, that survey (which was a lot less than $7K) was some of the best money I’ve ever spent. Also, the decision to work from home the day the blasters showed up was an excellent decision.
The problem that can arise is if the fence ends up a foot or two over the property line onto your property you could lose that portion of the property under certain conditions. The neighbor’s fence I mentioned above actually ended up two inches onto my property - a lawyer told me I could avoid losing that strip by giving my neighbor written permission, so I did but the reality is that two inches doesn’t really matter to me. A foot or two would matter- but my lot is only 20 feet wide and that probably has somethng to do with it.
My wife saw a fox climb over a chainlink fence without breaking stride.
To the OP - if you don’t care, the problems are likely minimal. IME people greatly misunderstand and overstate the fear of adverse possession.
That lawyer was correct.
The likeliest issue is if you are selling and a prospective buyer makes an issue about it. But if you don’t care about that, you can deal with it when/if it comes up.
I have never NOT had a survey done when buying/selling homes. Funny how differently things are done in different places.
If you lose enough land that your house no longer conforms to local zoning code, it could be an issue. No idea if that’s relevant to the situation or not.
Ninja’d by Dinsdale puzzlegal but I’ll post it anyway:
It could matter in the case of adverse possession. If by being two inches smaller your lot is now under the minimum lot area required by zoning (assuming it was at the minimum in the first place, which in many subdivisions is often the case), thus making your lot technically unbuildable and any future addition/remodeling projects would require a zoning variance. That can affect resale value and cause all sorts of other problems. So your lawyer was right that putting together a letter for legal notice of the encroachment is prudent. It doesn’t need to be much more complicated than that.
Only if there’s financing involved. A lender will always require a title search, but otherwise title searches are optional. Not only that, but a title search won’t tell you where the property boundaries are WRT improvements (buildings, fences, wells, etc).
And as others have noted, the easiest way to undermine any claim of adverse possession is to give written permission to any property that’s yours.
My back neighbor and I just split everything 50/50 when we had the fence between our properties rebuilt this Spring. The old fence was wood, ancient and in great need of repair. He had broached the subject a year or so ago while he was accompanying his daughter selling Girl Scout cookies. In March he decided to pull the trigger and gave me a call. Now there is a low wall topped by a nice, high vinyl fence that will never need painting and looks great. He dealt with the contractors and ran the plan by me for approval before they got started. No huhu and all I had to do was cut a check. Everybody walked away happy.
Yeah. Could have turned into an issue. The fact the lots were large, the buildings well back, etc., meant that the lot lines could shift a long way before any of us had non-conforming development. Adverse possession was a risk, at least for the portion of their driveway on our land.
As it was, we lived there another ~5 years then sold the place without issue. That was a dozen years ago.
When we bought our house we knew replacing the fence was going to be a top priority. The old wooden fence surrounded the property on 3 sides for a total of just under 300 feet. It was rotting away and leaning over and very much not appropriate for keeping dogs and small children contained. The neighbor to the west had built his own fence 6” or so on his side of the property line, the neighbor to the east is a jerk and I wasn’t about to propose splitting the cost with him, and the neighbor to the north is nice guy but kind of a hermit who never uses his back yard. We knew we’d be on the hook for the cost of replacing it, which we were ok with. Last winter, when the fence started to actively fall over, we knew it was time to move ahead and build a new one.
We chose a 6’ tall cedar fence with 2’ of lattice cap. It was very expensive – almost $19k. We did add another gate which has a metal frame and matches the rest of the fence – that is, it has the lattice cap and blends in with the adjacent fence so is not so obvious from the street. The entire thing is made with pressure treated posts set in concrete with pressure treated frame members supporting cedar planks and the gates are built on galvanized steel frames. It’s a beautiful fence and since we paid for it the neighbors were happy to let us go with the design we wanted. And they also got a new fence, or at least two of them did.
We did not get a survey done, we simply had the new fence installed on the same line as the old one. The fence company did all the permit work with the city.
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