Lot 1 of Campacuas is about to "lose" 40'+/-....
I, too am looking closely @ Lot 1 of the subdivision. I am guessing it's more a matter of junior/senior rights. The west line of the subdivision: is that encroaching on the ownership #3 or did the larger property the got subdivided come first, and ownership 3 is encroaching on them. If those "ownership" parcels are metes & bounds descriptions, and those red marks meet their legal descriptions, then perhaps it's only ownership 3 affected.
In my opinion, a study of the deeds is in order, and possibly a study of their titlework/history. And, as I said, communication with the parties.
I disagree with the guys that say walk, don't run...etc. If this is family, I would hope you could help out by talking to the surveyors and seeing if you can get a copy of whatever deedwork there is. (For all I know it's all one big subdivision. It's just the way it is presented, that I am assuming a subdivision abutting a string of m&b.) My help for a family member would be to help with research and finding evidence and talking to the surveyors. You know the right questions to ask. It sounds like some guy just saying "your driveway is encroaching" probably won't be very helpful, but I would reach out to him anyway. I can see right away that he probably doesn't want to be wrong and doesn't want to share much.
I agree. If these parcels were the first out of a larger tract, then the monuments set by that surveyor hold.
In the absence a survey play (hopefully recorded) of Surveyor A's survey, its pretty hard to offer advise. There seems to be a lot of things at play. Surveyor A may have had very legitimate reasons for setting the iron rods where he/she did.
Yeah, and if this is the case the occupation is the result of using the original monuments and boundary by agreement doctrines don't need to apply. The occupation conforms to the original survey. It doesn't get more basic than this. It's just that its hard to let go of the numbers in the deed, can't look beyond the POB tie and its flashing out of the data collector and CAD screen. Yes there may be issues but don't fix them by shifting all the boundaries around to fit the record over the original monuments. Somebody may have lost some area due to the mistake (maybe mistake). Sue the grantor or his surveyor for their mistake if it means that much to you and you have been harmed.
You've given us a pretty good outline of the recent survey history, but what about the more distant survey history and the deed history?
The "block corner" appears like it existed prior to Campacuas Estates. What subdivision is the block a part of and what's happening with the rest of the block? How does record and measured match E-W across the block?
How does the deed of the parent parcel of Campacuas Estates read? Is the wording of the deeds for Owners 1, 2, & 3 the same in the most recent deeds as it was in the original deeds for those parcels? What was the wording of the description of the parent parcel for those parcels?
Was the parcel line on the West boundary of Owner 1 already established on the ground when the parcel for Owner 1 was first surveyed? Was Surveyor A the original surveyor for the parcels of Owners 1, 2, & 3? Who commissioned those surveys, the grantees of the parcels, a grantor/owner of already existing parcels, or the grantor of the parent parcel that these were each divided from?
A few years before I was licensed, we were surveying several contiguous lots of a subdivision that had been made about 40 to 50 years prior. (there's a pertinent point to this war story - you can jump down a few paragraphs if you just want to get to the point) The map showed regular lot widths of something like 50' from the South Boundary with the most northerly lots being slightly wider, apparently intended to take up the excess. For some reason, when the lots were sold, each was written M&B using the dimensions shown on the plat with the POB being a monument reportedly on the South line. We found a monument on the well established South line of the subdivision, purportedly marking the POB location and fitting reasonably well with nearby monumentation and occupation. The 3 lots we were surveying were several hundred feet N of the S line.
We also found what appeared to be reliable monumentation along the N line, I don't recall if original or not, but again, on a well established line and fitting the nearest monuments and occupation well. Our field survey found the subdivision to be about 5' short of the record length N-S and we found no interior monuments to the subdivision. There were well established lines of occupation along most lot lines in the form of fences, retaining walls, edges of gardens, etc.
Upon trying to lay out the lots, we found our calc positions falling consistently N or each lot line just about the same amount as we found the entire length of the subdivision to be short. We checked several other lot lines and found the same thing... not a proportional difference as if the original surveyor had been using a spliced chain, but a consistent 5' at every line we checked.
The same surveyor who had surveyed the subdivision also wrote the descriptions. He wasn't often available to speak with, and had a hard time remembering when he was around, which was about 1 day a week to sign maps because his unlicensed son (failed PLS exam, according to some rumors, more than 20 times by the early 90s) was now running the business. The son did remember the survey as one of the earliest he had worked on (he was about 60 when we were surveying there). He recalled that they laid out all of the lots starting from the N line and realized the error in the overall dimension as they finished at the S line but never corrected the map and wrote the deeds from the S line anyway. My boss said that company had been known to do similar things like intentionally setting 1' offsets rather than actual corners as reflected on some maps, and he suspected that the old coot had intentionally created confusion by writing the descriptions from the opposite end as they had actually been surveyed and leaving the bad distance on the map.
The point to this story is...
When retracing subdivided lands that start from one end of the property and things don't fit, look to see how the entire parent parcel compares to record, and then look at your data to see if it indicates that the lots were laid out from some other starting point on the parent parcel boundary. The job is to reproduce what the original surveyor actually did, not what he was supposed to have done, and quite often, not what he said that he did. The stability of the boundaries that were actually established is more important than the boundaries that were thought to have been established (the record) but in reality, never existed.
