Hey guys,
An earlier post made me think about this old subject again. Maybe I shouldn’t be bringing it up since Hub Northing was incarcerated...
But I am. I get the problem with someone offering to ‘find your property corners’ and not be a licensed surveyor. But is there something wrong for them to say that they are just helping you find the evidence in the ground? They are lending their limited knowledge of how to use a metal detector and a shovel; and their metal detector.
Have you, as a licensed surveyor ever gone out to a job site and just found monuments for a client and told them that you can’t promise they are the property corners, but here are some monuments in the ground? Is there something wrong with that? Is that practicing land surveying if you don’t claim to be a surveyor and don’t imply to the client that they are their property corners?
Note, I have never done this and am only asking from a philosophical standpoint. I have done this at my own house though. Without having a land survey done, I looked at the plat and searched for monuemnts to make sure the property looked right.
I noticed the following couple of the comments on below posts.
“If I owned a fence company, I'd require a surveyor to flag the corners. It would add a few hundred dollars, but at least all liability would be taken off you.”
To me, for only a couple-hundred dollars, the surveyor isn’t doing much more than finding existing monuments. I sure don’t think you can locate monuments and the controlling and/or adjoiner corners and confirm the validity of the corners and set any missing corners. (Maybe you can).
“One cannot say that any found monument is his client's "property corner", because if he does, he's practicing land surveying without a license.”
That implies to me that the poster believes one can find monuments, but just not portray them as actual corners.
(For those that don’t know, “Hub Northing” used to find monuments and stake out fence lines without a surveyor’s license. (that is, while he wasn’t trying to kill anyone).)
I would certainly not discourage anybody planning to build a fence from getting a surveyor involved, but I don't think a fence contractor that goes out to the job, finds or is shown the survey monuments, strings a line and starts building the fence is surveying without a license. I don't think the busy-body neighbor that comes over and points out the monuments is either. The problem is that without at least doing some simple measurements, they won't know if the monuments are the right ones or maybe have been moved, etc. A recent client of mine (retired engineer) built a fence along his back line before he hired me and he had used a grounding rod next to a power pole as one of his corners. It was within a couple of feet of the corner and it was made of iron, so the mistake was understandable, but somewhat costly.
I see what you're saying, and on paper its sounds plausible.
But I don't see it working out in the 'real' world
Doing it for your self is one thing, doing it for somebody else, regardless of the relationship, causes a liability that cannot be shrugged off by a professional.
Not unlike a lawyer, which there are about 1000 of here on beerleg.
Would you accept legal advice from a legal aide or secretary?
Sure, at your own risk! And if it was wrong or caused you damages what would you do then? Of course there isn't any re-course through the bar since they aren't a lawyer.
Sure, at your own risk!
The footing and foundation of a free society. When applied and accepted it worked just fine, that is what built a strong and respected country.
jud
Liability
The crux of the matter is that ANYONE can survey his or her own property.....some states have this written into their regulating laws. And as it has been pointed out here, any two owners can set their property line where they want it to be without professional help, and it can even be recorded without professional involvement. And sure, you can hire some guy with a shovel and a metal detector to find your "property markers" but after that, what do you really have? Some pipes that they dug up?
To perform land surveying services for profit, one must be licensed. The reason is liability. There has to be accountability when one engages another to perform a service. After all, the only reason one hires someone else to do ANYTHING is because they can't (or don't care to) do it themselves.
Hire a non-licensed individual to find your "property markers" and you have no legal expectation of competence, accuracy completeness or truthfulness. Hire a licensed land surveyor and you have an expectation that the results are accurate and reliable.
If they are not, then there is a legal remedy. The licensed surveyor is legally liable because they have the training and expertise to be responsible for what they do. And they need to be legally liable because the determination of your property lines doesn't only involve you......it involves each and every adjoiner.
As stated elsewhere, would you let your brother-in-law represent you in a trial if he wasn't an attorney?
Would you let your cousin take out your appendix on her kitchen table if she's not a physician?
Liability
So, Here's one I did a while back. There is an iron pipe under the 2' mark on my tape. It's sticking about 3" above ground and has some old flagging on it. I thought it was the corner. For a minute. As I got into the survey, things weren't adding up back in that corner so I did a stakeout to the calculated corner and found the original lot corner buried 6" under the black fence. It checked with a tenth or so. A check of the adjoining deeds and a talk with the owner of the black fence (45+ years of ownership) revealed no transaction, recorded or otherwise which would have changed the location of the corner from the iron under the black fence to other iron. Everyone held the iron they could see. Just like a "metal detector and shovel" guy would do. Everyone was wrong, just like a "metal detector and shovel" guy would be.
In California, what you propose would be surveying without a license and punishable as a misdemeanor offense.
For any surveyor, I would never recommend locating monuments without attaching assurance to them as to their representation.
Early in my career, I located some corners on a 40 acre parcel using some rough measurements. They had been set by an earlier survey and all I did was go out and find them using a compass and string box.
Problem is, the surveyor who set them blew his corner moves and they were all out of position by up to 70'.
I discovered this when the same landowner asked me at a later date to put some intermediate points along his boundaries so he could fence to them. I did a proper survey between the monuments only to discover the large discrepancies with record.
Another time I was asked to do a topo survey and flood cert. The landowner showed me his corners that had been shown to him earlier by someone else.
I subsenquently discovered that the corners he showed me, were not his corners, but actually the corners for an adjoining lot and that his lot was actually about 200' away from where he thought.
Never, never will I locate a corner without field measurements to other corners in the area to satisfy myself as to what the monument represents.
As a Licensed Professional, when you give your personal opinion regarding topics within the purvue of your license, you are professionally liable for that opinion whether you have been paid for your advice or not.
That's from Victor A. Schinnerer Insurance Agency that published a bunch of court decisions regarding Professional Liability Insurance back in the 1970s.
As a licensed surveyor you do have a higher standard that the ordinary landowner is not faced with. What an owner chooses to do at his own risk only commits him to correcting any harm he does if brought to task, heck sometimes their actions ripens into ownership. What may apply to us is limited to us, not the world.
jud
Good ole Hub said he was insured. If I recall right, he would guarantee his location for the fence, and that meant if he was found wrong, he would pay/be covered for the relocation of the fence. (Of course I don't know how far I can believe Hub)
Many fence builders say they are "bonded" or some such word which they imply that they will be covered if they place the fence in the wrong place. I wonder how often they are taken to task and/or have to move their fences?
If a person goes out and locates some steel, how is that against the law (clearcut)? Do you have case law or statute law that says you can't do what I suggest? Is what I suggested "land surveying"?
Can't a person hire out his service and just so long as he doesn't claim he found the property corners is he safe? I agree with everyone who doesn't "advise" to do what I am questioning, but is it illegal.
I agree that, as a licensed land surveyor, you have a higher standard than a non-surveyor, but if you recommend a land survey, and tell them what you found is not necessarily the 'corner', is that covering your higher standard?
It seems to me that a land owner should be required to have a land survey prior to building a boundary-line fence. Maybe even prior to building any improvement. How can you even know the improvement is all the way on your property if you don't know where the lines are?
I have had requests for just finding monuments and my reply is that I will only go out and find ones that I have previously set or verified by doing an actual survey.
A few times after being at a site long enough to recover some monuments I was told that was all I needed to do and was asked to end and give them a bill.
On my invoice I state that my charges are for my time and expenses that include driving there and looking at the project and then client decided to not proceed with a survey.
I purposely did not include anything about finding monuments or doing any actual surveying to limit my liability if it was claimed that I did something I actually did not do.
I get tapped for this all the time, and found the solution. I hand the owner my metal detector and let them find the corners, based on my pacing skills. It does two things, makes the owner walk out his lines based on his local knowledge (or lack of such, as is usually the case with most of these) and enforces to them the ambiguity of what we just did.
When I suggest we look in a different place and they find multiple versions of what is going on, or nothing at all, it makes my next suggestion that they get a legit boundary survey done by a licensed professional more palatable.
I will accept nothing more than common hospitality for doing this, and if they are grilling or cooking seafood, can do quite nicely for an hour's work. I always make sure they know my brand of beer beforehand, and have a DD lined up if things get out of hand.