I am doing a small lot survey.
I have a subdivision map from 1912 and my clients deed says he owns and the eastern half of lot 10, and lots 11, 12, 13. Fine. All lots are 30' wide.
So I pull all the adjoiners deeds. Yipeee.
The neighbor to the west, well his deed reads...being lots 8&9 on said subdivision map.
No mention of the western half of Lot 10....Hmmmm.
I chase both parcels back to 1912, and the first deed out for my clients parcel and my neighbors parcel read the same as the they do today. No deed out to the western half of lot 10.
Now the neighbors house definitely sits on the western half of lot 10 and he is clearly possessing his 75' (30'+30'+15') and various owners have probably done so for the last 102 years.
Kinda interesting that nobody has picked on this in the transactions over the 102 years (I counted 8).
Just interesting that's all.
SEE (!!), all those conveyances without a survey and there isn't a problem until...!!!!
Ain't that the way it always goes 🙂
That doesn't really affect your client though right? You don't have any encroachments onto the eastern half of lot 10 from the neighbor and your guy isn't encroaching onto the western half. I'd say you're lucky you didn't do the survey next door!
[sarcasm]There we go, Surveyors making problems again [/sarcasm]
But seriously, I've run across similar cases. Almost always what seems to have happened is Mr. X buys lots 8 & 9, then later in a separate deed buys 1/2 of 10. When Mr. X, his wife or children sell, everyone forgets to include the second deed in the new transfer. You would need to grantee search all 8 previous owners looking for a deed in to them for the 1/2 of lot 10.
No. This is not my client. It is the adjoiner to my client.
I just thought it was interesting that's all.
He may be your client if you can convince him he has a need to get his title issues rectified. Good luck.
Hope it's not one of those "hey my neighbor wants a survey too!" jobs. Although, it kinda feels like the guy probably has title to that half of the lot. Who knows where the record of that is though... All the more reason to get a survey.
Do you guys typically do a survey every time title is transferred up there? Here it is usually done unless there is already a very recent survey that the title company will allow the purchaser to use or if the person is not getting title insurance.
About 3 years ago I saw a 40 acre 1/4, 1/4 that had been transferred 3 times, then split to a 20, had a house built on it, then sold again twice. Title Insurance on every sale.
I got the call (from PLS charged with breaking into two 10's) that our maps and PLS tool were wrong and we needed to fix them --- of course. Which sometimes turns out to be the case.
However, in this case the problem is the description (for every transaction) was for a 40 that was 6 miles to the west in another township. Whoops...
I suppose that the intent was good?
Since I only see substantial errors, it feels like about 1/4 of filed descriptions in this area contain a substantial error. Title Insurance appears to me to have lost any inspection element. It is now only an arbitrage of risk, with the underwriting excluding any possible defects from coverage. (In other words the coverage has no real value.)
I will go out on a limb here and claim that 90% of the errors that I am shown would be discovered with only a cursory check, perhaps by checking M&B's with a mechanical description reader like DeedPlotter and plotting aliquot descriptions with a a web based parser. In other words, the errors are fully contained in the plat-in-hand: You don't need to look to adjoining documents to find most of the errors.
What ever the cost of review (by the Title guys and typically by the lawyer who authored the deed) would be quickly saved by the reality of cleaning these messes up.
Just my 2 cents...
M
I have had this happen and then talked with the owner, who produced the missing deed, which was part of an estate.
nope...surveys are not required for the vast majority of real estate transactions.
I was looking forward to reading a story about a minimum of 8 people with missing feet caused by some whack job killer. I was somewhat disappointed. Interesting problem just the same.
Five or six years ago I had to track a 10 foot strip back to the 1930s. In the 20s one neighbor had conveyed a 10 foot strip to the adjoiner. The strip was conveyed with then grantees original parcel a couple of times, but during the Depression, the bank foreclosed on the grantee, then resold the his original property, but not the strip. There was no further record of any conveyance of the strip. The house on the original grantee's lot has been using the strip since I'm-not-sure-when as a driveway. We were surveying the lot of the original grantor for a larger apartment project, and it took me 6 or 8 hours of deed research to determine that our client did not appear to have any right or claim to the strip. Our client eventually made a deal with the neighbor for a portion of the strip, and gave them a quitclaim deed in return.