Last week we discussed buying a home. When buying a home, an issue which should be addressed is verifying which real estate you are getting with the purchase. One of the best ways, if not the best way, to exactly know what parcel you are buying is to have a stake or boundary survey done prior to closing on the purchase.
When you purchased your home, you most likely did not get a stake survey of your property, which is also called a boundary survey. Stake surveys are not usually required to close on the sale of real estate and many in the real estate industry do not encourage stake surveys. If you financed the purchase of your home, most likely you had what is called a mortgage survey. But do you know the difference between a mortgage survey and a stake survey, and the protections of each?
The most common type of survey that you as a homeowner will see is the mortgage survey. A mortgage survey shows whether your home and any improvements are within the boundary lines of your property and whether there are any structures or improvements from neighboring properties encroaching on your property. The mortgage survey is not for your benefit. The mortgage survey is to benefit your mortgage lender which requires it before a loan is granted. The lender is not as concerned where your property lines start or end or where the corners of your property are located. As such, a mortgage survey should never be used to determine property lines or build improvements.
On the other hand, for a stake or boundary survey, the surveyor will document all the corners of your property and mark them with an iron stake. Using those stakes, the surveyor then maps out all of your boundary lines and verifies the legal description. With a stake survey, you get more information than a mortgage survey. You will know the exact location of all your property lines.
If you do not get a stake survey, your property lines may not be where you think they are and then you may end up with a boundary dispute with your neighbor. That is never a good thing.
For example, I once purchased a 39 foot subdivision lot with a small home on it. Before I purchased the property, I had a survey completed. The survey showed that the existing back yard fence was 9 feet inside the property line. By having a survey done, I was able to increase the size of the backyard by nearly 25%. Had I not done the survey, I would have left the fence where it was thinking that’s where the property line was located.
If the fence had been in that location for more than 15 years and the neighbors had openly, notoriously and exclusively occupied the property, they could have filed a quiet title lawsuit for adverse possession. If successful, they would have been the owner of part of my property.
I had another situation in which a client owned some property along a road in the middle of a section of a rural township where the lots were one-half mile deep. They were the only property on their road in that one mile section that had never been surveyed. All their neighbors to the east and west had long ago been surveyed and the property lines established for 30 or more years. Driveways, homes, barns, fence rows and farm fields had all been located based upon these old surveys.
According to his property description, my client had 450 feet of frontage on the road, which amounted to about 27 acres. When he had his stake survey done, he discovered that he had less than 300 feet of frontage. He found out that his township section was a short section. At 5,120 feet, it was 160 feet short of a 5,280 foot mile. In such situations, surveyors are supposed to allocate the shortage pro rata to all parcels in the section. However, the surveyors of the other parcels had been a little lazy and only measured the parcels to the west from the west section corner and the parcels to the east from the eastern section corner. The short section was never discovered until my client did his survey.
Since all of the old surveys and property lines had been established for more than 15 years and for other legal reasons, my client who thought he had a 450 foot wide lot, had only a 290 foot lot. Because this lot was one-half mile deep, that 160 foot shortage amounted to about 10 acres. My client only had a little over 17 acres when he thought he had purchased 27 acres.
I had another case in which a fellow purchased a home that was going to be demolished because of redevelopment. He also purchased a lot to which he was going to relocate the home. Foundations were dug and the home was moved onto the new lot. Unfortunately, he did not survey the lot that he had purchased and moved the house onto an adjoining lot that was owned by my client. My client did not want the house on his property and the house purchaser did not want to move the house onto his own lot after paying to move it once. Had the house purchaser spent less than a thousand dollars to have his lot surveyed before he moved the house, he would have saved my client and himself tens of thousand dollars in legal fees to resolve the matter.
Not too long ago, a survey saved me quite a bit of expense. I was removing a number of dead and dying ash trees from my yard. One huge dead ash tree appeared to be on my property but was close to the property line. Since I had done a survey when I purchased the property, I hired the surveyor to mark the property line. Good news for me. Bad news though for my neighbor. The dead ash tree was not mine and I saved over $1,000 in tree removal costs.
Whenever I purchase a parcel of real estate, I have a stake survey completed prior to the purchase. I want to know where the four corners of the lot are located. I want to know if any of my neighbor’s buildings are on my property or my buildings are on somebody else’s property. I want to know if the fences are actually on the property line. I want to know if I am really buying what I think I am buying.
If you really want to protect yourself, you should order a stake survey when buying real estate. Most homeowners do not get a stake survey because they do not want the additional expense and do not see the benefits. However, I do not think that you could afford not to have a stake survey. You should want to know if the property that you are purchasing is in fact the property that you are purchasing.
By: Matthew M. Wallace, CPA, JD
Published edited January 12, 2014 in The Times Herald newspaper, Port Huron, Michigan as: Having a survey done is critical when you’re purchasing real estate