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So I'm viewing a survey showing the boundary of a property. What actually determines what legally is the boundaries of the property? My understanding is a surveyor is simply measuring things, but is there a document that tells the surveyor what is legally the landowners boundaries? A hundred years ago I assume there wasn't technology to give a precise lattitude and longitude measurement, so how does this work?
The survey starts from a known location or locations (called "benchmarks". In a housing subdivision there are typically steel pins driven into the ground at lot corners (though not necessarily all lots or all corners).
The original description of a plot of land (when it was first cut out of whatever it was cut out of) contains the survey data as in "north xx feet from [description of corner marker] then east yy feet..." and so on until the boundaries are completely described.
The older the survey the more likely that natural features are used as markers. But in most areas of the USA there are surveyor-placed markers. In some cases there will be markers like "the inside corner of the stone wall" or things like that.
Part of the professional knowledge of surveyors is defining appropriate markers; another part is placing markers when needed.
When you go to buy a property, you can simply buy it assuming that the amount of acreage shown is accurate and that fences etc. are located within the boundaries. Or you can have a survey done, which means that the new surveyor will follow the instructions of the previous surveyor and will confirm acreage and the location of boundaries. As an example, we recently bought a small piece of property and found out after the re-survey that the property was actually some tenths of an acre larger than the tax records stated. I believe the previous surveyor's calculations were slightly off, maybe due to rounding errors or precision of calculation. The previous survey was done in 1968 so all calculations would have been done by slide rule most likely.
If you have a large piece of property and you want to sell off part of it, the new boundaries will be described in survey language.
Now the details of how legal descriptions are done will vary according to the state, so further details will be specific to your locality. In Texas there are two main ways of describing land: 1) Metes and Bounds descriptions are usually used for larger pieces and rural property; these descriptions refer back (eventually) to the original survey done when the land was first settled; 2) Platted subdivisions add a layer to the descriptive documentation, in that the subdivision as a whole has a metes and bounds description, and then for the details of the lots within the subdivision you look at the plat which subdivides the area.
So in Texas, for example, property A in a rural area might be described as "Parcel 18B of the William Brown Survey, map 76-A, Anderson County", and property B in a city might be described as "Lot 41, Wellington Estates Subdivision, Parcel 24 of the Thomas Smith Survey, map 28-F, Tarrant County". I probably don't have the exact terms completely 100% correct as this is not my profession, but something very like that. In all the cases, the location of the boundary lines of each piece of property is described by the surveyors' descriptions of where they are, with reference to benchmarks either natural or man-placed.
Most of the country is laid out on a grid, with townships and sections, and monuments at the corners permanently affixed to the ground. The legal boundaries of the property are written as text... measurements from the nearest monuments to other described points, with angles and directions and distance.
Sometimes plat maps are filed with the County and the legal will reference the map.
Find your legal description. It will say what the boundaries are. The surveyor's job is to read the description and be able to mark it out on the ground, and on paper to match.
Start at the county appraisal office. They will be able to lead you. I expect each state is a bit different. I know that in Texas we don't have townships, or sections, for example, because Texas was settled prior to the railroad surveys of the mid 1800s that set up so much of the Midwest.
Legal descriptions of property have existed since the country was founded, in Europe prior to that and even in ancient Eygpt. George Washington was a surveyor. There were tools used then as well for measurement. It's nothing "new."
Is this a property for sale? At least in our area... If it's listed in our MLS, they should have posted the legal description with the listing. Regardless, your agent could get it for you.
Is this a property for sale? At least in our area... If it's listed in our MLS, they should have posted the legal description with the listing. Regardless, your agent could get it for you.
Yes, but that would probably just be either "Lot 5434, Willow Bend Subdivision" or "parcel 55, Wilson Survey" or whatever is typical in the OP's area. You have to go a bit further to find the survey details. The assessor's office can tell you how to find those details for any specific piece of property.
So I'm viewing a survey showing the boundary of a property. What actually determines what legally is the boundaries of the property? My understanding is a surveyor is simply measuring things, but is there a document that tells the surveyor what is legally the landowners boundaries? A hundred years ago I assume there wasn't technology to give a precise lattitude and longitude measurement, so how does this work?
It partly depends on where you are located. For example in Maryland propety descriptions can often be traced back to the original land grants by the King of England. But these have been codified over the years and will now go to a benchmark that is registered as part of the National Survey (I can't remember the exact name it is the basis for topographic maps) Most residential lots will go back to a subdivision plat that is filed at the county when raw land was divided up for development. That is filed at the county and maps out how the lots are laid out specifying the length and direction of each property line. Property corners are usually marked with pipe or steel rods driven into the ground (sometimes they end up completely below the surface but initially are at the surface and have a wooden stake near them to help locate them. Current surveys are being converted to GPS coordinates but it is straightforward to convert them. I always want to know where at least two corners of my property are since with that the others can be found. I worked on a survey crew years ago (before GPS and most electronics) and we onetime had a property where we could only pin one corner initially. The company owner had to go back to surveys made in the 1700s and found existing survey points about 5 miles away and had to go through over 170+ years of land records and transfers to find the other corners. Most were much simpler, mainly verifying property corners and that no structures encroached on the property lines.
In most states the surveys are based on the grid system that was set up when the territory was created, but the basics are the same.
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