Land size measured on Google Earth

flusher · May 6, 2012

greasemonkeyok said:
If your land is adjacent to a public road or stream, your property boundary may actually be in the middle of the road or stream, not the fence line. A boundary line survey is always a good idea if the acreage amount is important to you.

Yep, that's the way it is with my nominal 10-acre plot (660 ft x 660 ft square parcel, i.e. 1 furlong x 1 furlong) that was surveyed in 1905 when this area of the county was zoned. So on the official county maps, my parcel is shown as 9.92 acres (10 acres minus an easement for the road). Bummer, since 10 acres is the cutoff for ag buildings on a relatively inexpensive ag building permit. For parcels zoned exclusive ag and less than 10 acres, you're limited to 600 sq ft or less buildings on the cheap permit. For parcels over 10 acres, the limit is 12,000 sq ft or less buildings on the cheap permit.

pacerron · May 11, 2012

vtp said:
You can also use GPS to set markers on the map.

If you look at Google maps ( not google earth ) at the right elevation it will show faint black lines of the property outlines.

Google Earth usually has enough angularity to cause some distortion and many addresses are off by 1/4 mile or more. Bing appears a lot clearer these days but doesn't have all the clutter overlays that earth has that you need to turn off to use it for anything serious.
The govt. map that has the soil types overlay appears to be more accurrate and that is what most counties use to establish CAUV ( farm use values )
for taxation of farm land versus residential. Many county auditors have all the information available on-line for all the properties in the county including an outline map overlay. That's the one your taxes are figured on so if you think you have a dispute start there.

MikeA57 · May 18, 2012

MasseyWV said:
Google Earth is about as accurate as the perception most men have about the size of their... equipment. :laughing:

I think I have to agree with that. I shot a piece of our property and ran it and it came out at 155 acres in EarthPoint. I did it a second time but this time I zoomed in on Google Earth and did better point plotting. Ran it through EarthPoint again and this time it came out as 100 acres. So apparently, zoom level plays a factor...