Hello. I??m new to this forum. I??m having issues with my neighbor concerning lot lines. They are original owners in our court along with the previous owners of our house. They were best friends and created the front yard berm together. When we moved in, they told us the property line in the front of our houses, concerning the berm area, was mostly there??s. We purchased a pool and they requested that we call before digging and have all utilities marked. After doing so they marked the utility easement and it was marked close to their driveway/berm. ?ÿSo I tried to talk to them about this and they would have nothing to do with us. So my question is whether or not the utility easement lines, which also show our property lines from the back of our property being on the left utility easement run to the front of our properties to the right side shown on the plat map, is considered accurate or is it like the county property map, which is not guaranteed to be accurate. I??m looking for an unbiased opinion before I hire a surveyor for 10,000. Thank u in advance for anyone??s replies.?ÿ
Well, to start, if whoever located the utility easement was not a surveyor and it was just the utility locator, they probably could not have accurately laid out your easement lines. ?ÿ The utilities SHOULD be close to the center of the easement but that is never guaranteed. ?ÿ?ÿ
if the maps you are discussing are the online provide maps and images, they are not accurate enough to rely on as that??s essentially a giant image draped on all the different plats/boundaries projected together for mostly assessor/reference purposes. ?ÿ
Without additional insight to your property, I would say that 10,000 seems steep, but with the proper background information of the property, it may be right on. ?ÿ
what it does boil down to, os that to accurately identify the easement and property, you will need to hire a surveyor and hope that you have actual monuments on your lot still to ease their job. ?ÿ
i hope this helps, but apologize as there are rarely any absolutes in surveying.?ÿ
Use the above to learn about the Society of Land Surveyors in Iowa.?ÿ They have the list of all licensed land surveyors available in the state.?ÿ Most of the names on that list do not advertise in the Yellow Pages as they can earn an adequate living without such advertising.?ÿ The $10,000 figure would far exceed that of all of the lot surveys I have been involved with in Kansas.?ÿ I may need to move to Iowa.?ÿ I see you are in a fairly small city, so I would expect there to be four or five local land surveyors within a 40 mile radius of your home that would know far more about surveying in your city that someone from Des Moines, for example.
As mentioned above, what the utility locator is doing and what may appear on the plat map of your addition to the city are two very different things.
Utility locators don??t mark easement lines, they mark the actual buried utility. The easement and lot line are not necessarily parallel with the buried utility and the utility is not necessarily centered in the easement.
The berm is most likely not relevant to the lot line location since it sounds like it was a neighborly accommodation, not any sort of boundary agreement. Note that Iowa has an unusually strong acquiescence law (which means it is easier for property owners to agree to a less than accurate boundary location).
As others have said you need a Survey if you need to know where the property line is located. $10,000 sounds high for an ordinary lot survey even in California but there could be good reason for it (large lot, aliquot portion of a Section, very old subdivision in old part of town, all the surveyors in town are extremely busy and not looking to get into a fight and rural acreage are a few reasons).
@dpuffett might be able to refer you to someone familiar with Dewitt. He hasn't posted for a couple years, but we'll see if this gets his attention.
Boundary by acquiesce can be an expensive proposition in Iowa thanks to a Supreme Court opinion that says only a court can find it has occurred. (Heer v Thola) So much so that a bill was introduced that died last session to "eliminate" the doctrine. Most of the expense of course is for lawyers. A far more inexpensive solution is a boundary by agreement where there is uncertainty.?ÿ
650.17 Boundaries by agreement.
Any lost or disputed corner or boundary may be determined by written agreement of all
parties thereby affected, signed and acknowledged by each as required for conveyances of
real estate, clearly designating the same, and accompanied by a plat thereof, which shall
be recorded as an instrument affecting real estate, and shall be binding upon their heirs,
successors, and assigns.
Not sure if it's been mentioned but on occasion utilities somehow get put in outside their easement line as a path of least resistance to something harder to work with (like a berm).?ÿ
The plat will give a width (usually) from the lot line to the limit line of the easement. Depending on building codes and common sense you are allowed to build some structures, fences, landscaping within the easement, but it's normally not allowed to sink footers, foundations, in-ground pools within the easement.
Driveways, sidewalks, movable sheds, swing sets, are usually allowed.?ÿ
Picture it this way, you build a pool in the easement and you're building on land that's partial owned by all the utility companies jointly. They can dig right through your pool if they wish. Of course, that would be a very aggressive stance for one of them to take, what happens in the real world is that they work it out with the landowners, but don't discount the possibility of backhoes trenching through the concrete wall of your pool.
You should get a survey and site plan to do the work, otherwise you'll never know how your property/easement lines and structures are related to each other, and building in the easement might put your property in legal jeopardy which can make it difficult to sell later.?ÿ
10k is really over the top for my area, sometimes it might get that high, but it would be a rare urban lot survey.?ÿ
I'm just an old math teacher, but that experience gave me a lot of insight into the truthfulness of unsolicited volunteered information. The short answer is that it's usually wrong and biased toward whoever volunteered it. It's designed to ward off further investigation. It's a bluff.
By all means, get the survey, but don't share the results with your neighbor. Just proceed accordingly to the results of the survey.
The price of a proper survey may seem high, but building a pool on your neighbors property will be far higher. As others have said the utility marking service marks the location of the utilities (and sometimes that not real well, you get what you pay for) and knows nothing of boundaries.?ÿ
Get some more quotes on a survey. $10k does seem high. But it could be legit, depending on circumstances. And the more legitimate that price is the more you need it done.?ÿ?ÿ
I??m looking for an unbiased opinion before I hire a surveyor for 10,000.?ÿ?ÿ
The Surveyors opinion should be unbiassed.
Ten K seems fine, dunno what these other dudes are griping about.
@mightymoe That's pretty spot on. A lot of times these type of improvements don't become an issue until someone digging on their property cuts a cable that's located in a utility easement, in which case they are liable for the cost of repairs, which in the case of a fiber optic cable, could make a 10k survey look like a garage sale bargain, though I think that cost is likely a bit exaggerated. The second instance is when someone decides to sell and the bank requires an as-built survey as a condition of financing and it reveals an encroachment that could cause the bank to balk and forces the seller into an owner financed arrangement, which is far from ideal. Usually easements are tied to the property corners, so the first step most of the time, is getting those cleaned up and nailed down. Last thing anyone wants is to spend a small fortune building an improvement half on their neighbor's property. Usually doesn't work out too well.?ÿ
If you are asking about the utility lines that the locate company painted on the ground with various colors of spray paint,?ÿ hereabouts (Oregon) they are supposedly within 3 feet of the actual buried lines. So the actual underground utility line could be directly under the paint marks, or 3 feet towards your neighbor's property from the paint mark or 3 feet towards your property. Emphasis on the?ÿsupposedly.
This website ?ÿincludes the state law regarding utility locates in Iowa.
You can hire a surveyor to find the property corners that were set to define the common boundary line and then have the surveyor set stakes on either side of the line to indicate the extents of the utility easement. Normally the utility easement will parallel the property line at a set distance. At my house there's a 10 foot wide utility easement running along our back line. 5 feet of the width is on my property and 5 foot is on the neighbor's.?ÿ ?ÿThese widths will vary from subdivision to subdivision. 10 foot total width. 15 foot total width. Etc.
I don't know if it's a rule, but one locator guy told me he was supposed to be within 18 inches either side of the actual utility line, or a total of 3 ft swath.?ÿ If the line is near the surface he would normally be much closer to that but at depth of a typical HV electric line maybe needs that margin.
But we all know that utilities are seldom installed in the center of an easement. A 3' swath offset 2 feet from centerline, could put the utility within 18" from the edge of a 10' wide easement.
