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Retracement Survey consensus among professionals
thebionicman replied 2 years, 8 months ago 27 Members · 109 Replies
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@warrenward
Yes, the existing boundary agreement moved the line a 1.5?ø over because the carport pad was poured over the line 20 years ago. The surveyor who performed the agreement is now the county commissioner. He also did the adjoining survey of the Lodge that was the owner of all this land back in the 1930s. He found all the monuments and set one. Same for the agreement, just one set. What the agreement shows, is that the monument he found, he describes as the corner between tract 1 and 2 and the corner of the two adjoining lots.
I tried to hire him first, because he is the ??best? in town. He immediately brought up my neighbor by name and said my neighbor could tell me where the line is. That was a red flag for me. Later after the cousin supplanted the surveyor we hired, we called him again and he said he didn??t want to get involved. The problem with that, is he would be the best person to solve this ??problem? but has shown some red flags as far as conflicts of interest. He is also up for re-election this year.
Have any of you professionals supplanted another surveyor? And if so, did you definitively say how much the other guy is wrong before conducting your own field work? That was the most shocking thing about this situation, we hired someone, whom sets one lost iron per the deeds and then within hours we had a small town shake down run him off. Is that something that is common in the surveying industry?
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A true retracement survey with few original monuments in place will weed out the so-called beep beep surveyors and button punchers that have a preassigned location to put their monuments from the real investigators who diligently search and use shovels to find ancient evidence that lurks beneath the ground.
I can’t answer your problem without making competent research for possible monuments of record to look for and making an intense on the ground search for evidence and then sitting down with all the compiled data and hoping there is enough real evidence of past surveys to make a decision on.
good luck
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The Lawyer teaching a boundary dispute seminar I was in years ago said don’t hire lawyers, don’t hire Surveyors, he said get a good bottle of wine and go next door and make friends with your neighbors. He said once the lawyers get involved they say don’t talk to each other except through the lawyers and it all goes downhill from there.
It sounds like the subdivision is very poorly done and there may be no clear or easy answer. Just holding one point and running out the record geometry is not proper boundary Surveying practice. I get what your saying about Surveyors trying to “fix” the entire neighborhood, they are trying to establish some sort of rational pattern (which may not exist).
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Thanks for your response.
Yes, we were friends with the neighbors, until I got tired of their daughter parking on my lawn and garden. When surveyor number one showed us the boundary they got nasty, I assume it??s because it made them out to be liars. When we first moved in two years ago, the neighbors said the previous owners ??gave? them a pie slice. It??s just too bad that neither of the parties made it official. From the day we purchased we actively possessed our land. Cleaning up the old landscaping and renovating the mid century home. When the family shake down happened we erected a fence set back 3ft which instigated them to start litigation. The cousin recorded his map at the register of deeds 3 months later, the day before they served us.
This all seems so simple to us just being laymen homeowner and tax papers. The old plat definitely is a protracted subdivision from a ww2 vet in 1950. I was told this was the first planned subdivision in waynesville. It appears the county commissioner who did work in the past handled it appropriately by describing the old marks in the ground that were very close to the intent of Nathan Rogers. -
Simply put (I hope) there really is no baseline or point of beginning, especially in a protracted subdivision such as yours. The corner monument could be existing and established for one purpose but not for the purpose you want it to be. Laws and rules for surveying are in place that are supposed to result in not changing established lots, and not redesigning neighborhoods. However, there are evidentiary problems even if all surveyors involved are very good at what they do. I would be looking for the most permanent current physical monument (paved road maybe) possible to tie any boundary agreement to, in addition to an accepted coordinate system such as state plane. You have a block of lots and everyone has a deed for a certain amount, but maybe there’s not enough (remember it was not surveyed on creation). So, we can’t just give one person what their deed calls for absolutely, based on one monument, when that conflicts with what another persons deed calls for based on another monument. It gets very complicated balancing evidence and equities involved.
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There is a series of blocks in an addition to a small town near here with a problem that could possibly be like your situation. The plat was drawn in 1868 with outside dimensions of precisely 1320 feet by 2640 feet. That is a common fraction of a square mile. Surveyors know that such fractions virtually never match the standard numbers, as were used here.
The blocks were laid out when needed, not all at one time in 1868. Then, later, surveyors attempted to establish where specific lots should be within those blocks. For a given block the first survey might have been for a lot of the east end. The second survey might have been for one on the west end. No one measured the entire addition, then measured the entire block, then set the lot corners. Nope. That was not the normal situation as this was all slow work compared to our capabilities today. Thus, the blocks in my example have been found to be from eight to 18 feet short in an east-west dimension. This was not discovered until too many lots had been surveyed using differing methods by different surveyors in different decades. The land owners had assumed each surveyor had done perfect work and developed their tracts accordingly. Eventually the shortage was discovered. Somebody somewhere was coming up with less land than they should have because they were being expected to absorb the entire shortage for their block on their lot because they were the last to learn of the shortage.
Bad stuff happens.
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Yes, that definitely sounds like what is going one here. Our tracts and house was established many years prior to others and they measured from the control point. When the other lots became established it was short of the old plat. So at that point, I would think adverse possession would win our our behalf because of our predecessors, marks, title.
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I understand what you are saying, thank you. What I find interesting is the neighbor in dispute never had a survey in 60 years. There deed refers to lot 30 per the plat. No description. Our deed and everyone else??s around has a description that all line up. What seems to have happened is when lot 30 and 32 was sold they didn??t survey and the it was sandwiched between marked lots. They lost somewhere between 8-11?? between lot 30 and 32
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Duane,
Would you tie it to lot 30??s outside line ? This is the map for the boundary agreement proportioned to deed north -
Adverse possession? in North Carolina? Really? Don’t let an “ambitious” attorney get your hopes up.
I see this stuff everyday. This is a product of cheap surveyors, cheap land owners, cheap attorneys and possibly cheap real estate brokers and/or developers.
It’s astounding, although not surprising, that it was possible to beckon six surveyors to such a mess. People will never learn.
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I would avoid any mention of lot numbers, because this was a protracted subdivision and description by lot of questionable location is the root of the problem. The only way to recover from this original source of error is to eliminate it from future use. We do that by use of coordinate systems and physical monuments. There are particular ways to write the new description that depend on all the surrounding circumstances. Others may have different ideas, but that’s mine.
So, you have some iron pipes there, but I would add some ties to the foundation corners of the house, maybe add some coordinates to the pipes, maybe tie to something permanent completely off site. The idea is to perpetuate the location with sufficient backup information. This happens in modern subdivisions because all lot corners are monumented before sales, so loss or movement of a few can be detected. And if everything gets disturbed the coordinates can be used.
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In NY, if I could prove those facts with a fair degree of certainty we would win in court. Through retracement law, not adverse possession. Not sure how NC law deals with it.
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Yea, I get it, the neighbors want a judge to rule the cousins map is their property through proration. In the event judge decides against it, they threw in an adverse possession claim. We were thinking we had a better shot at that than they do.
Seems like this case is more a matter of law that a matter of surveying. We have a documents saying it??s our land through conveyance, title, taxes, known monuments, and possession. Seems like it would take a lot to change that?
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Thanks Duane, I would love for a surveyor to put coordinates in on that pipe and tie it to the grid which is 1300?? away. Problem is, none have done so, and you can??t really tell an man how to do his job.
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Title, who owns a piece of property, is usually a different matter from boundary, where the limits of that property are. Sometimes they do get intermingled, but generally shouldn’t – an argument over a boundary location should not be based adverse possession but rather on acquiescence and practical location. Except SC law does not support acquiescence as much as many other states, so your neighbor threw in adverse possession.
The deed description is to help identify and find the property, but not definitive to control the limits of the property, because of the other factors mentioned in earlier posts, especially that by Holy Cow. Paying taxes relates to title, not boundary.
Existing monuments should carry some weight, but as explained above may not always hold.
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You bought the place without a survey. The deed didn’t, and doesn’t, match the uses and occupations.
You bought the place without a survey, you were friends with your neighbors until you got the notion you wanted everything your deed says you own. You probably bought it based on what you saw, so in a way you tacitly agreed to the existing occupation when you bought it.
The nicest possible thing you could do to regain face in your community would be to get the current uses and occupations surveyed as-built and as-used, and use that survey to revise the deeds, quit-claiming or granting easements as needed.
If a course of action produces joy, peace, harmony, certainty, predictability, or closure, it is easy to get support for it.
If a course of action will only produce misery, anger, fear, uncertainty, it will only get support from those who like, or profit from, that sort of thing.
This might be why some of those surveyors decided you were a coyote fork situation and chewed their arms off (unpaid hours of their God-given lifetime) to escape the misery trap.
Choose joy, apologize, bury the hatchet, have a barbecue and be friends again. Free advice.
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When we first moved in two years ago, the neighbors said the previous owners ??gave? them a pie slice. It??s just too bad that neither of the parties made it official.
It doesn’t take a written agreement to establish a legal boundary. And the fact that a person starts cleaning up land that is possibly not theirs doesn’t make it theirs. The court would look for evidence of the agreement. How long ago? What evidence if any is there on the ground of an agreement and has it been continuous? Is there oral testimony of the previous owners that there was an agreement ? The answers to these questions would carry more weight with the county than any surveyors measurements or marks.
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I make my comment having only given the posted deeds and map a quick once over. There is plenty I don’t know about the specifics. Nevertheless, here goes:
The 1999 deed contains dimensions that suggest that the property corner monuments are not nearly at the dimensions the 1950 map and deed description prepared from it say they should be. Nonetheless, the monuments are called for and therefore their positions are the controlling factors, not the quoted dimensions. Trouble is that 70 years after the fact many of these monuments are very likely gone, any remaining ones may be difficult to find, and those might be remote from your property. Putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again may be quite a challenge. Your first surveyor may well have failed to realize that there was such disagreement between dimensions and monuments. Those that followed the 2nd may not have either until you pointed out the 2nd’s results. In the end, 3 through 6 agree with 2. So it’s 5 against 1. And who knows? If your show No. 1 the results of No. 2, he might change his opinion also.
For the record – I see at least a full day of field work recovering monuments and a half day to set new monuments, a few hours of research at the courthouse, a few hours of professional boundary resolution, and 4-6 hours preparing a map documenting the whole thing. So I’m spending 3 full days on this at least. Probably more. Hourly rates vary, but if you are getting guys to sign up for this for hundreds, rather than thousands, of dollars it is no wonder that they fold up and run away when they see that they have run into a buzz saw.
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Posted by: @linebender
When we first moved in two years ago, the neighbors said the previous owners ??gave? them a pie slice. It??s just too bad that neither of the parties made it official.
It doesn’t take a written agreement to establish a legal boundary.
Very possibly the previous owner gave them permission to use the “pie slice”. Which would preclude any legally enforcable unwritten agreement line.
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Forget hiring another surveyor.
I would suggest leasing a the parking area to the neighbor 1 year term renewable every year until they transfer ownership
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