NPCER: convince me we need a property survey

[ttt]

We're in the process of buying a house and we've been asked if we want to do a survey. It is "strongly recommended" and it also costs a lot of money. The house is about 30 years old, we have the original plat. We know there is a 10 ft easement for utilities all around the property, and nothing appears to be out of the ordinary. It is in an area where there is very little development and probably won't be much in the future. 

If a neighbor tries to build on our property, or if there's an issue, can't we just get the survey then? 

I know it is strongly recommended, but is it worth the expense? I am really tempted to save the money, but convince me why we need it. Or don't need it, if that's the case. 

[hopecounts]

Ultimately it's worth it ESPECIALLY with an older house where the boundary may have gotten fudged overtime.
It protects you and as mentioned above insurance won't cover issues related to this without one.

[Cicero]

Get it. The previous owner of our old house paid zero attention to the property line when she put up the fence. On one side it was yards inside of our property line and it was several feet over and encroaching onto someone else's property in the back. Fun is not a word I would use to describe putting in a new fence on the actual property line.

[downtoearth]

We didn't get one b/c ours was pretty well defined. If we need to fence the edge or have a dispute later, we'll get one then. We did measure - generally to make sure the boundaries were similar in square footage, but we didn't have acres or anything - 0.25 acres and two sides are defined by city ROW at our current house and 3 sides by city ROW at our first house.

We used one of these - borrowed, so it cost us nothing. www.amazon.com/Survey-Walking-Measure-Appraisal-Landscaping/dp/B005QSR2ES

[5thofjuly]

Yes, get it. My grandparents had an older house (built about 40 years ago.) It turns out that four feet of their bedroom was in the neighbor's yard. They forced the former owners to buy 5 feet of land from the neighbors as a condition of the sale.

[josieposy]

I had a property that transferred everything but a small corner by the street for at least 3 owners. It was the biggest mess ever to clear up. I would get the survey.

[sushi]

This wasn't recommended to me, and our house is almost 100 years old.

I honestly have no idea what's prudent.

Ate you moving to my area soon?

[Aquatica]

Definitely worth it to get a survey. I have 3 family members that have dealt with BS with neighbors and depending on the state, there are limitations to get a fence moved because it's on your property.

Ex 1, my parents purchased 10 acres and later paid for a survey. They found after spending a few thousand on rocks to make their driveway, half of it belonged to their neighbors and lucky not their house they were building. They put up fence boundaries and gained more land at the bottom for more pasture. Almost had issues with the bottom neighbors who didn't want to move their fence on parents land so my Dad went down there and built his fence and threw the neighbors old fence on their property. Never had an issue since.

Ex 2, Aunt and Uncle purchased 2 plots over from parents and found out their bottom neighbors fence was crossing on 1 acre of their land. Politely offered to move the fence (free of charge) and the neighbors are being assholes about it and getting lawyers because they don't want to move the fence.

Ex 3, a sibling and her SO had to deal with new neighbors moving in. They offered to split the cost of a survey along the shared property line. Neighbor refused, sibling went ahead with scheduling a survey anyway while new neighbor started building. Survey comes to find out, neighbor's house is halfway on siblings property along with other issues (such as neighbor trying to build a road through their pasture and driving through the pasture while sibling and SO are away trucking, leech lines from septic tank now flooding that pasture, and then trying to bully sibling and claiming the road was there through the pasture when it wasn't trying to get it grandfathered it). It went to court, and was tied up for over a year meanwhile being stuck with an asshole neighbor who built their house as close as they could get to sibling house when there was over 10 acres to choose from. Neighbor ended having to move everything since there is a law that a building must be a certain amount of feet away from the property line. Such a mess.



Hope you decide to get a survey, it is so much worth it.

[MixedBerryJam]

We prevailed over an asshole neighbor who put a fence in our driveway while we lived out of town. All the property lines in the neighborhood (built 1930) had "migrated" 18" to 3' over the years and she put the fence exactly on the property line, which her survey showed, sure enough, went through the middle of our driveway. (She had the fence on the other side on the historical property line, so she was kind of double dipping, if you wlil.) We sued under rules of (I think) adverse possession, as the previous fence had been on the historical property line for some 30+ years. So that little strip of land? She pays the taxes on it but I and all subsequent owners of my property in perpetuity have rights to use it for whatever we please, (including commercial, but it's only 18" wide so that was just in case I want to sell the vegetables I grow.) It was super complicated and time consuming. Get the survey, and be prepared for anything.

[iammalcolmx]

Nov 2, 2015 13:23:47 GMT -5 Cicero said:

Get it. The previous owner of our old house paid zero attention to the property line when she put up get fence. On one side it was yards inside of our property line and it was several feet over and encroaching onto someone else's property in the back. Fun is not a word I would use to describe putting in a new fence on the actual property line.

You are exactly who I thought of when reading this question.

[StrawberryBlondie]

I'm trying to remember if this was even recommended to us and I don't think it was.

[hopecounts]

the people who bought our house didn't get one, we had one done prior to our buying and had done nothing to change anything since so they just used ours for insurance purposes.

[ttt]

Thanks everyone. I guess we'll bite the bullet and get it done.

[theoriginalbean]

I wish we had in our newer house in a much older neighborhood, because we had our neighbor lawyer up to try to get us to cough up a large chunk of our land that is, apparently, actually his, even though we had it in writing that the fence was the property line. We learned that it had been part of an ongoing dispute with the previous homeowners and the original landowners, and because of a WA state law it's been annexed into our plot because it's been taken care of as part of the plot for the last 30+ years. I don't remember the actual term of the law, but we ended up getting our own lawyer and the neighbor backed down. It was a BFD for us, because the neighbor wanted to divide his land and sell the plot for a new house to go up, which would have been right on top of ours and would have killed our property value by taking away our view.

[Deleted]

Get one before you close on the purchase. I've seen some crazy drift of property lines while working for a municipal planning department. Like fences and garages tens of feet into someone else's property.

[josieposy]

This reminds me of that story about the guy who chainsawed his neighbor's garage in half because it was over the property line.

[asdfjkl]

Get it.  Chances are you won't need it, but if you DO need it, you will REALLY REALLY need it.  

A friend of mine has been in litigation for over a year over the boundary of a vacant property that she wants to build a house on, but the people who own the parcel next to here have built a shed of some sort where she wants to put part of her house.  They're fighting over the boundaries.  She has a survey so she will eventually win, but if she didn't have a survey, she'd be fucked. 

[imojoebunny]

Nov 2, 2015 13:18:17 GMT -5 Catlawdy said:

I used to do real estate closings.

GET IT. And get survey coverage and owners coverage on your title insurance policy.

The corner of my brother's place was in our cousin's lot. My sister's driveway was a few feet into her neighbor's yard and the property line was a foot from her house.

Do you trust that the builders, who you never met, put the house in the right place? I do not.

I second the get an owners policy for title insurance.  We have it on two houses, and have already used it on one of them (somehow, two different owners missed that they owned the house with a long dead woman, as did the title search person).  The other, we will likely need it in the future.  We were able to get a survey that was on file with the county for one house we purchased that was accepted by the owners title  policy insurance, but generally, we have had to pay for our own.  Even on the one we had the survey for from the county, we had to have a survey person come out to find the pins, since it is two acres, in the woods, and we needed the actual boundary for a construction project.  

Your mortgage company will get title insurance, but if you find out in 30 years, that you have a problem, or if you have a problem your mortgage company doesn't care about, as my neighbors do with a water line on their new house that is going through another property with no easement, having an owners policy is your friend.