You Can’t Build a House on Rented Land

I don’t tell this story often, but it’s a big part of why RPLS.com is built the way it is.

A while back — before RPLS.com — I started a Facebook group. I was working with a popular land-development trade magazine at the time, and a group for developers seemed like a no-brainer: free, instant, and everybody’s already on Facebook. It grew. Folks posted, talked shop, lent a hand to the next person coming up. It was good.

Then one day it was gone.

Somebody had reported another member’s post as spam. Not my post. Not even a real violation, as far as I could ever tell. But that one report was enough — Facebook took down the whole group. Every conversation, every connection, wiped out in an instant.

There was an appeal process, so I used it. Denied. No reason given. Not once, anywhere in that process, was I offered the chance to talk to an actual human, to explain, to plead my case. So I went digging and found a support forum buried deep in Facebook’s help system, and I posted there — honestly, more or less begging for help. Nothing came back. The only reply I ever got was from another random Facebook user, a stranger as powerless as I was, who wrote: “You’ll probably never get it back.”

He was right. I let it go and moved on.

I should’ve known better — and, truth be told, I did

I’m a previous land surveyor — 26 years in the field, licensed in two states — and I’ve spent a good chunk of that time building for the web, too. So I understood, probably better than most, exactly why that group vanished and why I never stood a chance of getting it back: I never owned it. I was a guest. And guests get shown the door without notice, without a reason, and without anybody on the other end who has to care.

That’s a big reason RPLS.com is built the way it is. So when someone asks why I don’t “just run a Facebook group,” I’ve got a pretty specific answer.

A Facebook group is rented land

You can build something worth having on rented land. But you don’t own the ground under it. The landlord can change the rules, raise the rent, or bulldoze the whole thing on a whim — and you’ve got no lease, no deposit, and no phone number to call. RPLS.com is land you own. Here’s what that actually means, in the ways that matter to a working surveyor.

When something goes wrong, there’s a human. On Facebook, “support” is a hall of mirrors — help articles and automated forms that loop right back on themselves. The closest thing to a person I ever reached was another user telling me I was out of luck. On RPLS.com, if something goes sideways, you email me and I answer. I’m a real person who’s been doing this work as long as you have, and this community is mine to look after — not a rounding error in a trillion-dollar ad business.

It can’t disappear overnight. The group I lost died over a single spam report on somebody else’s post. That can’t happen here. One unruly member, one bad day, one misfired algorithm can’t erase sixteen years of hard-won knowledge. The site is backed up, it’s ours, and it isn’t one anonymous complaint away from gone.

It’s findable — and it stays found. This is the part surveyors feel the most. Ask a great question in a Facebook group and the answer’s brilliant for about six hours, then it sinks into the feed forever — invisible to the next person who needs it, and invisible to Google. On RPLS.com, every discussion is indexed and searchable. Sixteen years of solutions to real field problems sit a search away, and they quietly pull new surveyors in from Google every single day.

You see what you came to see. No algorithm deciding who gets to read your post. No ads, no reels, no notifications yanking you off toward a video of somebody’s lunch. Just surveying — plus a Find a Surveyor directory so clients can actually find you, a Marketplace for jobs and equipment, and tools built for this trade specifically, not bolted onto a generic social network.

The short version

I want to be straight with you about the other side

Because pretending otherwise would insult your intelligence: Facebook has reach we’ll never match. Nearly everybody’s already there, it costs nothing to join, and a group can balloon overnight on pure ubiquity. If all you want is a casual spot to swap the occasional photo, it’s hard to beat — and I won’t pretend it isn’t.

But a professional community you’re going to lean on for years — one that has to survive, stay findable, and actually be there when you need it — deserves better than “somebody else owns it and you can’t reach a soul.” That’s the trade RPLS.com is built to make.

The truest thing anybody ever told me

I don’t think about that lost land-developer group much anymore. But “you’ll probably never get it back” has stuck with me all these years — because it’s the truest thing anybody ever told me about building on someone else’s platform. RPLS.com is my answer to it: a place surveyors own, that a stranger’s spam report can’t take away, and that’ll still be here — and still findable — long after the algorithm has moved on.

One last thing. There’s a decent chance you found this post because you Googled something like “should I start a Facebook group” and it brought you here. That isn’t a coincidence. It’s the whole point.

If you want a professional home that’s actually yours, I’d be honored to have you, if you aren’t already on board.

— Wendell, RPLS.com Admin