at one point a ways back, an accumulation of things like this would send me into apoplexy. changing scenery two years ago was one of the best things i've ever done.
"We have a concern on the acreage of the property as depicted on the survey. The prior deed and engineer seem to indicate that the property is 6.0281 acres, while the survey indicates 6.025 acres. This is about a 125 sq. ft. difference. We want to confirm whether the legal description for the survey matches that for the prior deed, meaning the acreage was the same, or if not, where the difference was. Would the surveyor be willing to sign an affidavit stating that this survey’s legal description is the same as the prior one? We need to have the exact acreage pinned down and this discrepancy between the survey and prior deed may cause some issues down the line as development begins."
Tell them that's the angels' share.
Tell them that property expands and contracts based on temperature.
maybe the engineer can sign off on what the correct acreage is......oh wait.....
:good:
I can't really blame them. It always amazes me how many square feet are in a strip of land just a few hundreths of a foot wide.
>This is about a 125 sq. ft. difference.
FWIW - where I work the size of a permitted building on a commercially zoned property ranges from a FAR (floor area to lot area ratio) of 2.5 to 10.
A 125 s.f. discrepancy between surveys at the planning phase and the permitting/ construction phase could mean that the client as paid for architectural plans that they can't pull a building permit on and will need to be redesigned.
Sometimes a 0.10' is just a 0.10'; sometimes it's tens of thousands of dollars.
Please read the fine print, the Title policy coverage does not extend to the area.
Don't tell me that the seller is basing price on SqFt, lol.
Here is a quarter, that should more than cover the difference.
B-)
Reply email:
"Please place your calculator on the floor and very quickly back away"
Gee and here I have been thinking for over forty years that area was the least important of all factors in determining property boundaries. If only, Judge Cooley was alive today.
> "We have a concern on the acreage of the property as depicted on the survey. The prior deed and engineer seem to indicate that the property is 6.0281 acres, while the survey indicates 6.025 acres. This is about a 125 sq. ft. difference. We want to confirm whether the legal description for the survey matches that for the prior deed, meaning the acreage was the same, or if not, where the difference was. Would the surveyor be willing to sign an affidavit stating that this survey’s legal description is the same as the prior one? We need to have the exact acreage pinned down and this discrepancy between the survey and prior deed may cause some issues down the line as development begins."
The questions they are asking are reasonable enough. They want to know whether the discrepancies in area are the loose thread of some larger mistake in the identification of boundaries. They aren't surveyors and aren't asking the question with much sophistication, but that's what I understand to be the underlying question: "Does this description correctly describe the shape and location of the subject tract?"
As for estimating the area uncertainty in a boundary located by a survey, that is actually an interesting exercise. If a surveyor has realistic estimates of the uncertainties of either the coordinates as determined by his or her survey or the courses and distances as reported by some prior survey, it can be done without too much muss and fuss. Of course, if all a surveyor has are just some numbers with no idea of what the uncertainties attached to them actually are, he or she would be SOL.
Square footage is actually the likely unit here. But that 125 s.f. is contained entirely within a drainage easement either way, and has 3 or 4 untouchable trees lying over the top of the line.
Well, the vesting deed had cursory mention of bounds, including the 500+' of TxDOT right-of-way. Monuments along the right-of-way are gone, so I'll be setting them. I surveyed both sides of Manchaca per the current CSJ, found called monuments, tied along the other r.o.w. and across it as monumented per plat, and tied the entirety of the adjoiner and the r.o.w. which it adjoins.
I don't know what the previous surveyor did, but I expect not as much. Also should be noted that this description was likely created as the leftover piece of a much larger tract that was subdivided into a couple hundred single family lots along with necessary streets.
It makes sense that the engineer would imitate the acreage on the prior deed, as that is the acreage by which it was transferred. It is almost always common for the surveyor to have different measurements in the field. I've recently decided that I would start to declare that the acreage of the parcel being surveyed was XXX acres per record, and XAA as measured. Had the survey said it that way, it might have clarified to the owner what the difference was. I totally agree with Kent that the client simply sees two different acreages for his property and would want to know why that is and exactly how big his property is.
I recently saw a court case where an owner had spent over $1M for some property where the contract said 65 acres. The deed named all of the lots and blocks in this subdivision. The subdivision plat showed 65 acres in the subdivision, but the lots added up to 57 acres. The dedicated roads made up the difference. If I were paying over a million dollars for some property I wouldn't be a surveyor I would have a major issue if I wasn't getting the acreage I was contracting to receive.
It does not- to me anyways- make sense why you'd design an entire site plan and write all your contracts off a 10 year old description prior to even closing on the tract- especially when you have a surveyor already under contract to turn around a title survey in a relatively short time frame. That's what is going on here, and going on more and more frequently around here.
Seeing that too.
Just got an email today saying a client who has been looking to buy a piece of property for over three months needs an ALTA on a 200 ac parcel. Supposed to close today. We have 3'+ of snow right now, getting another foot and a half this weekend. Not happening.
I do a lot of Conservation work and it amazes me when a surveyor will list an area to the nearest square foot, the architect will be a tenth or hundredth of a square foot and I am rounding to the nearest 10 square feet.
Someday I hope a Commissioner will call me on it so I can explain how 0.1' in 100' is 10' and we are measuring plants that sway in the wind.
> Well, the vesting deed had cursory mention of bounds, including the 500+' of TxDOT right-of-way. Monuments along the right-of-way are gone, so I'll be setting them. I surveyed both sides of Manchaca per the current CSJ, found called monuments, tied along the other r.o.w. and across it as monumented per plat, and tied the entirety of the adjoiner and the r.o.w. which it adjoins.
I'll bite. What's a "current CSJ"?
> I don't know what the previous surveyor did, but I expect not as much. Also should be noted that this description was likely created as the leftover piece of a much larger tract that was subdivided into a couple hundred single family lots along with necessary streets.
I'm not sure how that figures into things. What difference would it make if both descriptions report the locations of supposedly the same boundaries? If the main reason for the difference in areas is that your survey shows a different location for the right-of-way, then that's the explanation to focus on.
If RTK was involved in your survey, you might want to make a rough estimate of the uncertainties in the area to be able to tell your client what the tolerances in the area as reported are.
> This is about a 125 sq. ft. difference.
By my calculations, that is 135.036 square feet. If this about how much land the owner actually has and we are throwing out significant digits, you should have instructed the caller that their conversion isn't correct. You can then explain to the caller the difference between precision and accuracy, that's always fun! I hope there is a discussion about curve data as well. 😀
> > This is about a 125 sq. ft. difference.
>
> By my calculations, that is 135.036 square feet.
.036? really? the original acreage to the nearest 1/1000th of an acre isn't even precise to the nearest square foot. the thousandth of an acre is around 44 sf. so it is +/- 20 s.f.
The significant digits in the law of multiplication is the number of digits in the value that has the least no. of digits. Need to explain the precision/accuracy and significant digits 😉
(but you are right he said 125 and probably should have said 135. A typo I imagine.)
Those significant digits after the decimal place generally attract my interest too.
I am pondering over a current project that joins one I did over 10yrs ago of which I found many of the original divisional monuments of tracts of 50 acres to 100 acres tracts that are now a part of one parcel containing several thousands of acres of farm and ranch land.
On a 2014 survey on the other side of the fence, a surveyor's notes show that he set a monument at every corner and did not find any existing monuments.
In the past I have found all the original ones he claims to have set and the original monuments ranged from 1/2 inch rebar to rail ends.
TS measurement along one common 1200± ft boundary is 1.16 ft different.
At one end the monument does happen to fall in a 12ft deep and 25ft wide creek channel with a canopy of large oak, pine and gum along both sides.
Tomorrow I will visit the fence corner at the other end and see if his set monument is on the other side of the cross tie fence corner.
About that significant digits past the decimal place, his acreage is stated as 140.3647 acres of land.
There are 22 fenced boundaries and 200 calls down the creek.
All this from our latest RTK specialist in the neighborhood.
o.O
