Help! I need legal advice re: easements

[MDNY]

Similar, but not the same issue just happened to me today. I took the day off so I could be onsite while they poured the foundation to our new house.

Well a woman shows up and asks for me. After speaking with her she tells me that she feels that I am posted and surveyed on her land and she wants to discuss this.

I purchase a little over 12 acres and closed in February 2002. Our surveyor took great care and attention to confirm all boundary lines and our lawyer made sure of this. He is a real stickler for detail. So I ride down the road that is the back of our property line. Ours ends on the left and she point to some pink tags on the right. I say that no that isn't mine on the right, but I am on the left.

She tells me again that she feels we are posted on her land and that an arial survey is more accurate.

Bottom line. I don't care. I have a survey, a deed, tax records, abstract going back 150 years and a survey. But most of all I have TITLE INSURANCE. I will advise my lawyer about her, her claim that way he is in the loop if it becomes an issue.

I guess anyone can claim anything especially if they dont' really know what they are looking at.

Oh yeah the concrete pouring went well. MDBARB, good luck on yours.

 

[Gary_in_Indiana]

<font color=blue>"But most of all I have TITLE INSURANCE."</font color=blue>

Isn't that just about the greatest thing in the world. I had someone make a claim on part of my property (seems the seller sold it twice). I contacted the title insurance company and they handled it. I never heard another word about it. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[Robert_in_NY]

If the surveyors marked your land out that is all that matters, she can always have another surveyor come in and check it but they will just go off the other survey stakes. She is either misinformed or just ignorant as we have people like that up here. Take care.

 

[MikePA]

<font color=blue>but they will just go off the other survey stakes</font color=blue>

Perhaps I am reading your statement incorrectly, but when I worked for a surveyor we never went off another surveyors stakes, particularly if there was a potential dispute. We gathered the deeds for several parcels surrounding the one we were surveying (I know this because one of my jobs was looking up the deeds at the court house) and fed them into a glorified calculator (this was in the 70s) to see if they closed. When reading the adjoining deeds, we also looked for permanent markers, e.g., geological markers, intersections, etc. and started our survey from these points, even if they were a few parcels away from the one we were hired to survey. It wasn't all that unusual for us to have to tell people that where they thought their property was, didn't match the facts on the ground.

 

[Gary_in_Indiana]

<font color=blue>"We gathered the deeds for several parcels surrounding the one we were surveying (I know this because one of my jobs was looking up the deeds at the court house) and fed them into a glorified calculator (this was in the 70s) to see if they closed."</font color=blue>

Does "closed" here mean matched up or totaled up correctly (e.g. all the frontages along a particular road between two given permanent markers added up to the known distance between those two physical markers)? I've never heard the term used that way before so I'm just going by the context here.

 

[MikePA]

Deed descriptions usually start with the phrase "Beginning at a point...", and then list a sequence of directions and distances. The last direction and distance sequence should land you on the exact point you started on. How well a deed "closes" is a measure of how far these two points are apart. The calculator program (you can now download software from the Internet that will do this) we used required we enter the directions and distances and it would produce the closure error. If the error was small, we used the original deed description. If it was too far off, we tried to reconcile the differences by using the adjoining deeds. It wasn't unusual for two deeds to have different descriptions of a common property line.

 

[Robert_in_NY]

Around here there really is only one surveying company and they usually work off their other stakes. The only company is about 40 miles away and they do almost everyones surveying and are backed up with work for months. I do not know what would happen with a dispute, probally along the lines of what you said but most of the property is owned by farmers here and the ditch is the property line and they don't need any stakes to tell them that. The only time anyone here surveys their land is if they are either logging it or going to sell of a section.

 

[Gary_in_Indiana]

"Closes" then refers to closing the loop, so to speak. Makes sense when I look at it like that. Thanks, Mike. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[Spencer]

I bought (I thought) 6.25 acres but when my surveyor got on the case he said it didn't close. I ended up with 5.93 acres when all was said and done.

 

[MDNY]

Rob,

Your right. Our surveyor has been doing this for sometime and he pulls all the records available to insure he has accurate data to support his survey. She was talking as if the back hillside of my property was her back section but that would have crossed the road (seems odd).

In addition my lad was sold off from the larger parcel and the last section on my side is being sold as well. The bottom line for her is the road is the back boundary marker for each side.

I might be a city boy, who once lived in the country, and is moving there again. But I wasn't born last night. This is an issue for our lawyer if it goes that far. I figure I will drop him a quick note or speak with him when we get our wills set up this summer.

If she persists in calling me again (she asked for my # as it is unlisted) I will give her my attorneys name and let her know she will get the legal bills. Our attorney made sure we had title insurance, then he updated our policy to cover our new home under construction.