What's a mere 5400 Acres??
With a good total station and about 3 prisms on the pole you could lay out the perimeter of a 5400-acre circle with a radius of 8653 feet. There are lots of places where that could be achieved, along with shots to any building corners and main utility lines. All from a single setup.
I'm trying to figure out what genius thought you'd lower your proposal by 75%.
5400 Acres??
In practice, the main difficult thing about surveying a tract that size in the Texas Hill Country (aside from rough terrain and cedar) is that it will almost always be an aggregate of a bunch of smaller tracts that have to be considered as such if only to use ties to interior corners to prove up the locations of corners on the perimeter of the aggregate. This significantly increases the level of complexity.
On ranches that have been assembled from many smaller holdings, typically the record reflects a jig-saw puzzle of pieces that don't fit together all that well on paper. In rough country, it is not at all unusual for pasture fences to veer off boundary lines, so even the fences at best may show only the general locality of a corner.
If the ranch hasn't been extensively bulldozed or cleared, plenty of evidence to make the survey will still exist. If former owners have used a dozer to remove old fences and to clear a wide swath along the fencelines, reassembling the puzzle may be fairly difficult.
This is the type of client you RUN from. I might even send him a revised quote adding the 18,000 in to my original bid because it was an alta.
5400 Acres??
Is it even reasonably possible to do all of that in 30 days?
5400 Acres??
> Is it even reasonably possible to do all of that in 30 days?
No, of course not. Just the research on something like that, researching the land grants and those adjacent, putting together the working sketches of them, preferably on some georeferenced base, assembling the abstracts of title, and compiling the working sketches for the various parcels is at least a week or two by itself and they're all the sort of tasks that five people can't do five times as quickly.
Trying to hit the field before the research is done will only guarantee a clusterfuge.
If the whole site is GPS'able then maybe my fee would be cheaper. But I was on a 5700 acre boundary for an auction from a power company that was selling off land they bought back in the 40's for pennies on the dollar. Similar situation as the one they called you about, except it was KY and we had to traverse a good bit of it with some of it on the Ohio River. Our fee was a good chunk, and the client got what they asked for. I was not the owner so I don't know the exact numbers, but $300,000 sounds about what we charged. The funny thing is the owner was worrying about how much the bill was for, whatever the exact number was, and the client turned around and charged our surveying fee as the retainer for the land to the winning bidder. So they didn't even pay for it. They included it as part of the transaction and the auctioneer got a percentage of the entire sale. Our fee was around 1% of the transaction while the auctioneers was around 6-7% of the transaction. They have no legal liability to either the buyer or the seller, while the surveyor assumes a lot of responsibility when he makes decisions pertaining to the boundaries involved, title, etc.
$10 Million +
The NC of Tejas should talk to their NC of Louisiana counterpart.
I have done work for the latter in recent years. It seems that they were burned badly on a possession line case somewhere in Louisiana and Arkansas and they lost a lot of money and acres because of a poor survey or no survey at all.
They are very sensitive here to any type of encroachments, old fence lines etc. and get everything surveyed. Thye are also proactive in any development near preserves since they do alot of prescribed burns here on their tracts. The local districts select the surveyor, the state office Oks it and the national office pays. And they are very prompt in payment. Not a bad client here.
I never did an alta for them.
I would respectfully decline, and withdraw my proposal immediatley. Their total disrespect for me means I don't want anything to do with negotiating the extras they threw at me AFTER the request for "BID". These are indeed the tactics of chaletans. Learn to recoginze them and shun them from your life.
> I would respectfully decline, and withdraw my proposal immediatley. Their total disrespect for me means I don't want anything to do with negotiating the extras they threw at me AFTER the request for "BID". These are indeed the tactics of chaletans. Learn to recoginze them and shun them from your life.
I would give the buyer the benefit of the doubt. The leander may have said to give you the loan we need an ALTA Survey.
I would tell him my bid is still good, but its going to be $1000.00 for every ALTA line cert you want.
Its not east to tell a man with a $60,000 job to hire another surveyor.
Scott
What is really sad is that there is more than one company in the area that would have done it for that. It's impossible to compete with $#!@ like that. I have heard of horror stories what some of the so called "surveyors" were doing these ranches for in some of these Central Texas counties.
:good: :good:
There has always been some company that has surveyed very large properties around here. Their company name never shows up in the public records, only the property descriptions and when ask, the owner can never remember who surveyed their property.
Attempting to follow everyone of them when surveying adjoining properties result in the same common factors.
1 Monuments they set can never be found
2 No existing monuments along the boundaries are ever shown, show no sign of ever being found and most always are shown in a straight line when they are not.
3 Many of the property's existing monuments are mislabeled or indicate being set when they were existing.
4 When checked against your information, nothing ever fits.
0.02
My favorite job of all time was over 12 miles of boundary that crossed Black Cypress Bayou 7 times and included just over 1,100 acres for one tract of land. Transit and chain, one minute of angular closure and was out 3±ft N and 3±ft E. We hacked and painted the boundaries with barn red paint. The boss charged $3,700 in the mid 70s cause that is what he said he would do it for.
