Reporting area

> Just curious. What is the required standard for reporting area on a boundary survey plat in Texas?

There are various standards adopted for subdivision plats by different counties. Those standards may include a precision of expression of the lot area.

As for a general rule, there is this rule of the Texas Board of Professional Land Surveying :

§663.15. Precision and Accuracy.

Survey measurements shall be made with equipment and methods of practice capable of attaining the accuracy and tolerances required by the professional land surveying services being performed.
Areas, if reported, shall be produced, recited, and/or shown only to the least significant number compatible with the precision of closure.

That is a very poorly constructed rule and should be rewritten to omit the "precision of closure" bit, but the plain intent is to require that areas not be reported to some high apparent precision inconsistent with the methods actually used in making the measurements from which the area was computed.

Thanks Kent

I think the normal standard is 2 decimals, followed by a +/-. Gives you a little wiggle room since we ain't perfect. Some future super measurer may come along and call it off by 0.002 acres, and lawyers don't like that.

What I hate to see

What I hate to see is a statement that the fourteen-sided tract contains 5,437,846.534 square feet or 124.84 acres, more or less. A hundredth of an acre is 435.6 square feet so why suggest you know the area down to the nearest thousandth of a square foot. Just because certain equipment and calculators will give you numbers to a certain number of decimal places that doesn't mean squat in the real world.

What I hate to see

I take your point, but are you not simply reporting the area of the closed figure you are representing as the boundary? I understand that the odd (or frequent) attorney or client may not understand why your acreage is minutely different than a previsions survey or deed call. However, we all know the monuments hold, not the acreage or even the courses and distances that were used to calculate the given area.

I report area as a square footage down to the nearest foot and acreage to the hundredth of an acre. The reported area is what anyone would get if they did the math based on the bearings and distances on the plan. I know its not perfect, but it's the numbers based on what I found.

What I hate to see

Oh, my!

Do not use ± or more or less in Texas. (legal ramifications)

what legal ramifications for "more or less" after a stated area? i haven't heard or read of any.

What I hate to see

I'm with Paul here. We ain't perfect, and anybody who thinks they are needs to back up and take a breath once they get their head out of the sand.

The main folks who want area are assessors, and clients are just interested. Some lawyer types just like to find problems. The worst surveys and description in the world are area based... the West 20 acres of bla bla bla. You spend more time tweaking numbers than surveying. And I assume most of us will give ourselves some wiggle room for the next super rock star measurer, at least for placement of monuments and what we know is the real deal.

Face it, a building offset requirement is 5.00 ft. You go stake it. Do you calculate things to 5.00 ft, or maybe 5.05 or 5.10 ft? Be honest with at least yourself. Is area reporting any different?

this is one of those discussions where I always feel like surveyors twist themselves into knots for no good reason.

show the area however you like. If it's reflected in your survey, it will stand up to scrutiny.
I would love to see an actual court case where a surveyor was sued successfully where their field measurements and area notations were substantially correct. Obviously, if you screw them up, it doesn't really matter how many places after the decimal you go.

other similar topics:

the use of the phrase "legal description"

the use or non use of record vs. measured calls

the never ending search for that 0.04'

> this is one of those discussions where I always feel like surveyors twist themselves into knots for no good reason.
>
> show the area however you like. If it's reflected in your survey, it will stand up to scrutiny.
> I would love to see an actual court case where a surveyor was sued successfully where their field measurements and area notations were substantially correct. Obviously, if you screw them up, it doesn't really matter how many places after the decimal you go.

To tell the truth, I'm not sure why the Texas BOR felt obliged to produce that rule. I suppose that the main justification would be that excessively precisely expressed areas are deceptive. However, if the uncertainty in land area has a negligible value in the transaction (0.005 acre at $5,000/acre, for example), it's more a matter of form than substance.

Don't know all the details, but a land surveyor lost a court case in Blanco Co., for that term being on his plat.

I guess what bothers me is that when people report area to the most precise number they can get they should understand that number is pure fiction. One simple example. Set up a total station on a fixed point. Balance, rebalance and rebalance until you are thoroughly convinced you are absolutely dead center above a microscopic dot on whatever reference point you are intending to be set over. Do the same process with a tripod and prism at the target end over another microscopic dot. Once you are convinced you are absolutely set, hit the button and watch the results. Quite frequently the display will alternate by a hundredth. You are at that tipping point between rounding up or rounding down and the tiniest difference in conditions changes the number being displayed. At some instant, you lock in a number. But, two seconds later you would lock in a number different by 0.01 feet. On much of our work we have at least one line measured that is in the ballpark of 2640 feet. That minute 0.01 by 2640 amounts to 26.4 feet. And, this is only a single shot taken with far more precise methods than are applied routinely around a rural traverse.

BTW, just how precise is that little bullseye level. Seriously.

Just how perfect do you think the standard RTK shot is? That is, how perfect is the operator in ensuring the device is absolutely dead center above that microscopic dot when the button gets pushed? How perfect is the level bubble?

> That minute 0.01 by 2640 amounts to 26.4 feet. And, this is only a single shot taken with far more precise methods than are applied routinely around a rural traverse.

Calculating the uncertainty in an area computation is actually a fairly difficult exercise when you take into account the fact that all of the coordinates from which the computation is made have somewhat different uncertainties, some of which are correlated and others of which mostly aren't.

Reporting area on a subdivision map is generally required by code, so should be done to nearest square foot if it's indeed known. Some boundaries don't lend themselve to even accurately determing area (the center of a river being a boundary for instance)and should be qualified via a note as to the lack of accuracy and the reason.

Other than the subdivision map example, I suggest not reporting area at all, for multiple reasons. Isn't area about last on the list of "rules of construction" for construing descriptions-down there with coordinates? Why infer by even reporting it that it holds any control over the boundary location? Some would say it doesn't matter, but I've witnessed landowners make a fairly adamant assertion about "getting their acreage" when they've read somewhere the sqaure footage of their property. I once did a survey that was bounded on one side by the County Road (which was widened or realigned once or twice over time), and another boundary followed the center of a creek that meandered for about a half mile along the property. The area was not reported in their deed, nor could I find it anywhere on a previously filed survey. Maybe it was in the original creation description, or they were told the area by a real estate agent-who knows? In any case, they had a number in ther head they seemed willing to fight for. I told them I wouldn't be determining area, because it would require traversing the creek and resolving all the old road rights-of-way and even then, it was subject to change as the creek changed, or if I came back the next week and picked different creek shots. It's a transient boundary "area wise". Further, I explained I resolved the boundary based on the controlling deed calls and found monumentation, and that area played no role in my determination. I was not going to perpetuate the "area is important" myth by playing along.

If an appraiser needed it for their report or a real estate agent wanted an approximation for their listing, I may provide a separate report that qualifies its accuracy (or lack thereof, in this particalr case), but I would definitely not be putting it on my Record of Survey (and certainly not in any legal description).

It's time to quit automatically inserting area and think about whether it adds anything to the product, but mostly recognizing that it gives a false implication to the landowner of holding some importance.

I have a full 2-page rant (maybe it's only one) I once wrote up on this subject while working on a boundary dispute caused by this very issue.

Dave Ryan,
Eureka, Ca.