For Information Purposes Only

Since A Survey Itself Is Information...

...what purpose does the disclaimer survey?

Paul in PA

I've wondered the same thing myself and have seen this one many times. A good disclaimer should be candid and lucid.

I saw a plat once that was prepared for "disinformation purposes only".

The owner couldn't subdivide the way he wanted because of zoning regulations regarding the size of the remainder parcel; however the wily "surveyor" had a plan. Just incorporate an adjacent three acre vacancy into the outlines of the subject property and viola, all the clients problems are solved.

Unfortunate for our creative anti-hero in this story:

1. The vacancy parcel was never in the chain of title of his parcel or occupied by his client,
2. Since he had previously submitted and recorded half a dozen plats depicting the boundary in this area, the sudden appearance of a three acre bulge in the line raise a few red flags, and best of all
3. There was already work underway to quiet title to the vacancy in question and the adjoining couple that was claiming it were a state senator and a land use attorney.

After a few years of hearing and appeals,the licensing board required our creative protagonist to find a new line of work.

i've used that before, but changed at some point a while ago to "FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY".

reality being, these days, that i'm gonna be asked to send out a PDF to the client/attorneys/title company/etc before anything substantive happens in terms of progress on a transaction or development. attorneys, being attorneys, are gonna bleed all over whatever is put in front of them, municipal reviewers around here also seem to be paid based upon the amount of red ink they spill, and title companies almost always take some sort of, ahem, exception to something i've typed in .08 simplex on a page layout.

so i slap that on the signature line for that initial disbursement for two reasons: first, to save us the cost and labor of running off however many copies and mailing and/or delivering them to a handful of parties when it's almost guaranteed there will be comments needing addressed... and also because it's a defacto non-certification. wait till that day when you go through 4 rounds of comments to make everybody happy, then some flaky title agent ends up closing with your initial, pre-revised survey that you sealed for some reason.

i've insisted that we write into our proposals that interested parties will first receive an unsealed review copy of the survey for review and comment purposes, and that a final, sealed survey will only be delivered upon confirmation of no additional comments from all interested parties.

and you're asking "why not just leave it blank?"

answer: to shut down the assumption on whoever's part that i'm so incompetent as to forget to sign and seal a survey... (tends to be the lawyers)

>a final, sealed survey will only be delivered upon confirmation of no additional comments from all interested parties.

That might be handing over too much power to everyone. Don't you sometimes have to cut off the nit-picks and go with something you believe to be adequate?

> > That might be handing over too much power to everyone. Don't you sometimes have to cut off the nit-picks and go with something you believe to be adequate?

of course. by the time that version goes out on PDF my survey is complete. typically, with title companies, they'll want some clarification language on a schedule B item. (this often happens when a subject tract is serviant to a particular delineated easement, but only in terms of ingress and egress to a clearly defined description that falls on an adjoiner)

attorneys' comments are usually along the order of grammar nazi type stuff, or else usually of some sort of pedantic nature that serves mainly to display their sense of dominance over the proceedings. if i can reasonably throw them a bone in that direction, no problem.

client comments... those are almost never addressed. unless they happen to find some blatant oversight on everybody else's part (mine included).

bottom line is this: i don't change stuff on a whim. if somebody finds a typo or a transcription error (happens occasionally), i'm happy to correct it. this is 99% about tidying up the place settings at the dinner table, and not about the actual dinner.

par example: i actually had a comment one time that consisted entirely of "could you please move your north arrow and barscale 1/4" to the right?" fine, if that's gonna hang up this whole deal, no problem.

For my part, I try to specify that the client gets one review. Anything over that is billed at T&M.

John

If your disclaimer makes you happy, smile, it has done its purpose.

And that is probably all it will do unless it is a BOR certified statement.

Texas approved statement:
"Preliminary, this document shall not be recorded for any purpose and shall not be used or viewed or relied upon as a final survey document".

0.02

I remember a surveyor getting sued. The judge told him to bring all of his plats
related to the court case, including the ones stamped 'preliminary'.

I have struggled over the meaning of that as well. I don't know.

The best I can come up with, is that it's saying that you don't have permission to take my plat and copy it and sell it to someone else, or even worse take the sketch and put your signature and seal on it. That sort of thing. In the case of boundary surveying, you can look at my plat and figure out the boundary based on it, but you are taking responsibility for your own professional opinion.

Sometimes the note might be good if everything else is already covered. I once had the "For Information Purposes Only" note on my plat when I showed the existing centerline of the paved street joints around the perimeter of a block in relationship to the actual block corners. Some surveyors were using the centerline of the streets in a small town where the block monuments were scarce. The town repaved (concrete) most of the streets in town and had hired an engineering company to help with the vertical aspects for drainage. However, the town said it was "too expensive" and "unnecessary" to survey the streets so that centerline joint would match the center of the right-of-way. I got this information from a former city council member. Some of the centerline joints deviate as much as 6' from a surveyed centerline. Homeowners use the centerline joint for all sorts of stuff from building fences to placing things in their yards believing the paving joints are the center of the street right-of-way.

I heard of a surveyor that put the following on his plats:

"This survey is subject to what an accurate survey would show."