We had a county that became that stupid.?ÿ I refused to survey there for about 15 years.?ÿ Finally, the county realized people were very disgusted with those policies and demanded that things return to normal.?ÿ I have done a number of surveys there now.?ÿ A standard situation was Widow Jones died and the family wanted to sell the house and improvements but keep all the farm land around it.?ÿ They had a willing buyer who then backed out after learning it would take a minimum of two months to jump through all the hoops required by the county before he/she could take possession.
@rover83?ÿ Having complete historical records is great for surveyors but of no general benefit to the public.?ÿ The layman does not know how to extract any value from them, has no concept of bearings, does not know what a perch, rod, pole, link or chain is and has no understanding hexadecimal based math or converting tenths and hundredths to inches.?ÿ All they would end up with is a pretty picture that they can't interpret.
of no general benefit to the public.?ÿ
Good records benefit the public by letting surveyors get it right more often and with less effort & cost.
@aliquot how so??ÿ If you were to retrieve a copy of your PIQ, are you going to accept it as golden or put in the work to chase the POB back to it's tie point to verify that there are no gaps, overlaps or encroachments??ÿ In other words, using standards of care in the profession, you are still doing a complete resurvey of the property in hopes of relieving you from future liability.?ÿ What if the recorded survey was originally done by a surveyor with questionable ethics and accepted done the line of title changes only to find there was some sort of gross error??ÿ Who is on the hook for that?
When I speak of the general public, I refer to the layman.?ÿ Even if they found a copy of their survey on file from a previous owner, are they entitled to rely on it??ÿ Where I come from, the answer is no, unless they are listed in the certification on the survey.?ÿ If the survey is certified as mine are, with expressed wording that the survey is to be used for the title transaction only, they constructed improvements on the property and now have problems with the town, or, are trying to pull a permit to build something legally, can they use it??ÿ No.
Where is the benefit to the general public??ÿ Maybe I'm hung up on my own opinion and an experience I briefly relate below, but, what am I missing here?
As mentioned above, about two years ago I did a survey in the northern part of NJ.?ÿ The property was about 80 miles north of my office and there was construction going on next door with permits allowing a 4' property line set back.?ÿ My client (from hell) was an Attorney who was demanding that improvements were being built on her property.?ÿ I pulled copies of ancient subdivision maps, found control and did the survey work only to find out she was correct.?ÿ She had us return and place iron pins every 25' along the 300+ foot property line in question.?ÿ Next thing I know, I am getting calls from the surveyor next door, who is a local, telling me that my survey needs to match his.?ÿ I told him on more than one occasion to send me what notes and control he used to set up his boundary lines and he provided nothing for me to check.
A few months later, BAM!?ÿ Attorneys are involved, sharks are circling and the depositions begin.?ÿ I produce every email, field notes and phone logs related to my work on my PIQ, and he produces old record surveys from the basement of his firm dating back 50 years, performed by other firms and purchased when the owner died or retired.?ÿ No field notes, no found corners, just hand drawn photocopies.
The case moves on to a hearing (via zoom) with Attorneys and an Administrative Law Judge.?ÿ Each of us Surveyors had the opportunity to present our evidence as to how and why we determined where the line in question was.?ÿ I had field notes and sketches, photos, raw and processed terrestrial data, filed plans and was given the opportunity to explain my resolution of the boundary and answer questions.?ÿ I was grilled by both sides and my presentation took a little over four hours.?ÿ It was the other Surveyor's turn to refute my evidence and he presented no field notes, no data and copies of older surveys by others his firm had bought and relied on.
The conclusion of that day long event was that I cleared myself by practicing and employing proper standards of care and the other Surveyor was ruled against.?ÿ Given the fact that he relied on ancient surveys by others which were archived in his firm's basement and I did the leg work, had those surveys he relied on been filed, how would that be inthe publics interest to have access to them and rely on them?
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@northernsurveyor it's a simple concept, read through this chain and see my response to somebody else from about 2 minutes ago.?ÿ New Jersey has required filed subdivision plans to be filed with the County Clerk for at least a century.?ÿ Before that, New Jersey was informally spit into east and west NJ and there were proprietors on both sides of the east/west line that recorded land records dating back to land grants from the King of England, pre American?ÿ Revolution.?ÿ All of these records are available to the public either electronically from the County or State archives but if you want a copy printed for you and certified as authentic there is a reproduction fee to have them scanned and printed on paper.
NJ is one of the 13 original colonies and we have a different system that the public land BLM states.?ÿ We don't deal in Township, Ranges, Sections and divisions there of.?ÿ We don't deal with such things as double proportionate measurements and the like to re establish corners, we use campus rule adjustments and other things.
Filed plans are available for virtually every planned town, city or subdivision dating back to colonial times before the revolution.?ÿ Every deed for every land transfer is filed with the County Clerk or the Proprietors, depending on the time frame.?ÿ Cities and urban areas consist of mostly row homes, were monumented, but the monuments were obliterated over a few centuries leaving party walls behind to rely on.?ÿ All subdivisions going back to the post WWII building boom are monumented along their outbounds and along one side of internal streets, by State law, with the Surveyor's name and license number included on every IP or mon set.
With the above being said, what is the need to file every individual lot survey ever done??ÿ There are a few in remote areas in the pinelands that it might benefit but there is no need for the rest.
When I survey a quarter acre lot in a filed subdivision where we are all required to set corners unless we have a written waiver from the ultimate user to not set them,?ÿ am I doing the general public a service by tacking on the filing fees to file the survey after they have already paid the fees for filing their deeds?
I don't see the inherent benefit here.?ÿ We are one of the most densely populated states in the nation. I've been surveying for close to 40 years and don't see the benefit of filing an individual lot survey for me or my client because if I am revisiting a survey I already did, I have the records and it's likely a drive by, only locating new improvements, if it's somebody else's survey that was filed, I'm doing a resurvey anyhow to verify it.
What am I missing here, please explain.?ÿ I am not arguing in the slightest, I just don't see the inherent value to the general public.
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@dmyhill It means that if you engage me to survey your property for the purpose of a land transaction, I am engaging in the signed agreement representing you and your title company who will be insuring title based on my survey, it's clearly spelled out in my certification.
If the land is sold for cash and no survey is required and my client uses my survey to present to the buyer who was not a party to the original transaction for which my survey was prepared, my liability is not extended to the new land owner because I don't know what happened on that property since the date of my survey.
You are correct, it is a snap shot in time, however, it is only that.?ÿ Is it a correct snap shot??ÿ Liability is a huge thing in NJ where everybody wants to litigate everything.?ÿ If you pulled a copy of a survey I did and it was filed 5 or 10 years ago for a vacant lot, not developed, are you going to hit the ground, accepting my corners and locating the improvements, call it a day, then make yourself liable for not following in my footsteps to verify my corners??ÿ What if I dropped a half foot, 5', or 10', are you going to check me or just accept what I have done in the past and put yourself on the hook for not verifying my prior work??ÿ
@rover83 In my opinion, I'm not concerned about it being even viewed or "stolen".?ÿ If you want to steal my work, run with it, not verify it, and put your own signature and seal on it when I could or could not have made an error on my end, have fun with that because you just took the liability off of me and assigned it to yourself.
When it comes to ALTA surveys, I hate them until they go out the door, I despise telling para legals what I will say in the certification when they want to try to change my wording and I end up fighting with the Attorneys because I refuse to extend my liability to them.?ÿ I do some pretty large ALTA surveys with commercial complexes, apartment developments and the like, but, they end up being the lucrative jobs because they always come back for refinancing or updating reasons, charging 50% to 60% to update them and nobodyelse can touch that cost to start from scratch.
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I don't think your note will do much to proyect you. You will always be on the hook for your own mistakes as a licenced professional?ÿ unless you are outside the statute of limitations.?ÿ
Not every survey is recorded in recording states, only surveys that show a material difference in the boundary from the last recorded survey (like a new monument, or a previously unsurveyed metes and bounds survey).
Many recording states include in their minimum standards or statutes a requirement that surveys provide enough information to clearly explain how the boundary was determined, so it can be reestablished if corners are lost. In practice this doesn't always happen, and yes you are right, we lose a lot of the benefit of recording and may have to redo some of what they did in this situation.?ÿ
A recorded survey is publicly available, just like a deed. If the survey provides a reasonable justification for a boundary position it provides clarity and stability in the boundary. The next surveyor will have enough information to understand what the last surveyor did. Becasue the legal system values stability, this publicly availble boundary information will not likely change.
Unless the last surveyor really screwed up the next surveyor will reestablish the same bouandry even if he/she may have resolved the boundary differently, or they measure differently.?ÿ
Because of this a survey is a much more valuable and permanent thing. It adds real value to realestate, and from an egotistal point of view we surveorys know that our work will be used generations from now. This is much more sastifying (and profitable) to me than producing a liability transfer document that only applies to one person.?ÿ
One more thing, what is with Colonial surveyors bring up the PLSS all the time? The West (except the rural Plains) isn't all rectangles and squares. I have found working in PLSS states to be more challenging than Colonial states. While simple in theorey, in oracticr the PLSS is just as comolovated as metes and bounds, and PLSS aurveyors have to deal with both. I think that the majority of PLSS state surveyors go their whole career without doing a double proportion.?ÿ
