“Well-Reasoned Boundary Survey? Staking the Deed? What’s the Difference?” Part 2
We have already set up the situation in the previous installments so let’s get right to it.
Scenario 2
Twenty years ago, a landowner passed away. The Last Will and Testament stated that the property (then vacant) would be divided into two equal parts. One of the descriptions is written:
“Commencing at intersection of center line of Lake Shore Road, now Huron Shore Pike, with the East and West quarter line of Section 15, Town 12 North, Range 16 East, thence Northerly along center line of said road 123.25 feet, thence East to Lake Huron, thence Southerly along said Lake to said quarter line, thence West along quarter line to the place of beginning, being part of South part of the Northeast quarter of Section 15, Town 12 North, Range 16 East, subject to the right of way of aforesaid Huron Shore Pike as widened, and subject to any restrictions of record.”
The other description is similar to the one above. Suffice it to say, the second parcel will be adjacent to the above description with no gap/overlap.
Fast forward to today – a real estate agent is trying to sell the 10-year-old house on the property. A potential buyer requests that a boundary survey be performed. The real estate agent contacts a couple of local surveyors on behalf of their client and asks for quotes to complete the work. They provide each surveyor with a copy of the Deed for reference. Each surveyor reads the description on the Deed and, without doing any more research, recognizes that the description is not based on survey work and was most likely developed out of expediency by either a layman or an attorney. How do they know this?
To begin with, there is a decided lack of detail for the direction, or bearing of the lines. Rather than describing the direction to the nearest 1” (for example S 0° 52’ 27” W), they state “thence Southerly…” Obviously, the person who wrote it had no idea what directions to use.
In addition to the lack of detail for the direction, the distances described are also an indication that the original split was not done by a professional Land Surveyor. Even though the one distance cited is reported to the 0.01’ (123.25 feet), we have to be careful. There are a few decimalized equivalents that every surveyor knows is a potential red flag; one half of a foot = 0.50’, three quarters of a foot = 0.75’, and one quarter of a foot = 0.25’ are a few prime examples. These are red flags because just about everyone understands quarters, both the fraction and as money, so it is an easy conversion to make. If we surmise that the original parcel was described as 246.5’ wide, then we can make the leap in logic that the author of the description believed that splitting the parcel in half should equal two parcels both 123.25 feet wide.
Finally, in this particular area, the “Huron Shore Pike” is at a significant skew to the quarter line. In effect, the road becomes (watch out, I’m about to take you back to your high school trigonometry class!) the hypotenuse of a triangle. If the original parcel is 246.5’ wide as we theorize, then measuring along the road 246.5’ does not get you to the north line of the property.
Surveyor A, remember, is the one who believes that a boundary survey is nothing more than “Staking the Deed”. They read the description and return a price to the agent. He bases his calculated fee on doing nothing more than tracing the Deed on the ground. He does not consider the history of the situation, what the neighboring Deed might say, or who wrote what and why.
Surveyor B understands his quasi-judicial role and carefully considers what he understands about the history of the area, the fact that the road is skewed to the quarter line, and that the description was written without the benefit of a survey. Surveyor B is prepared to take into consideration all of the evidence when rendering his opinion on the location of the boundary. He knows there will most likely be some inherent issues with a literal translation of the description and he knows he will have to spend time talking to people, researching the records, and making careful observations on not only survey markers, but also other evidence of boundary location (fences, tree rows, driveways, etc.). He also returns a price to the agent.
What kind of numbers did the agent get? It should come as little surprise that the quoted fee from Surveyor B is almost double the quoted fee from Surveyor A. In the next installment we will dive into why Surveyor A is so cheap and what kind of harm the agent can do by advising his client to hire him.
