@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