Bearing Flip ttt

Nothing is more frustrating than trying to plot a deed that has enough courses in it to confuse the issue if a line is typed out as NW instead of SE. especially when it happens multiple times. Auto-annotating has come a long enough way to do away with flipped bearings on a plat.

Maybe it's just me?

Posted by: @steven-metelsky

Auto-annotating has come a long enough way to do away with flipped bearings on a plat.

Agreed. Create a closed polyline with beginning at the POB, make sure the direction is clockwise, and automate the B&D or line tags.

However, I have done a few ALTAs comprised of contiguous parcels with separate descriptions that already contain "flipped" bearings. Annotating the exterior boundary with both B&D clockwise sets it up so that at least one of the descriptions won't "work", and as others noted above adding multiple flipped bearings to the same line is poor practice.

Around here it is considered sacrilege to rewrite a poor description, and even suggesting that a better description would help the landowner and avoid many problems in the future causes attorney, title company, and even surveyor heads to explode.

My take on it is this: just as attorneys have their own idiosyncrasies that don't make sense to the average person - but will make sense with a little education on how legal documents are written - so it is with land boundary descriptions. Flipped bearings are one of those things that anyone with a basic understanding of descriptions can handle. If a person cannot understand flipped bearings they are unlikely to understand the other basic part of descriptions, like curves and strip descriptions...

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When attorneys are hung up on exactly perpetuating a description, some may be open to adding clarification after the direct quote, "also described as"

Agree. This ALTA is actually an upgrade of an existing plat where in my opinion, several of the old established record bearings were important and meaningful to show as is and may have lost meaning if I had flipped their bearings for the sole purpose of a readable new meets and bounds description.

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@rover83

I have not "rewritten" a description since I learned what it is that I am supposed to be doing (which does not span my entire career). I do not believe that I have the legal authority to do so unless ordered by a judge...

@jamesf1

We have people doing it who are actually rewriting descriptions they prepared the last time they surveyed it.  I'm dead serious.  They are reporting the tiny differences between what they got say three years ago when they created the tract and set the monuments.  It will read something like: thence north 47 degrees 19 minutes 12 seconds east, 308.82 feet (47 degrees 18 minutes 59 seconds east, 308.80 feet, record); thence................  This continues around the entire tract.  No side will match record.

@holy-cow Could there be a board rule that says descriptions must close mathematically? Perhaps there are various interpretations of what the tolerance is on closing?

@ashton

This is simply a matter of ignoring reality.  It has nothing to do with rules.  Whatever the data collector collected today is gospel and anything prior is wrong.  Go out and try to lay out a 50-foot by 100-foot rectangle.  Shoot it in ten times and get ten different perfect sets of results, none of which agree dead on with any of the others.  The monuments didn't move, the magic numbers shown do change, though.

@jamesf1

@jamesf1

Doesn't Arizona has a rule about re-writing legal descriptions.