"Survey not to used for fence construction"

I've seen some real doozies myself over the years and continue to see them used by many surveyors that by habit continue to use some invalid disclaimer because their legal connection insists it is "as advised by legal counsel".

The way I learned the answer to that conundrum was:
You sign it you own it.
A Surveyor is not entitled to make or change the law.
He/her can not circumvent the law by making a statement that limits the laws that are for every surveyor.
Your license entitles a person to perform surveying and to protect the public's interest at all times and certain standards apply to every survey related opinion you make.
A BOR must receive notice of any violations before they can proceed with any action.

Collect the paperwork and and ask a BOR member their opinion or just send the info in asking for clarification to the rule and if the BOR sees it improper to notify everyone licensed about the situation.

😉

Are they trying to say they don't stand by their boundary determination; or are they trying to say (rather ineloquently) that one can't be expected to correctly set improvements on the property line based on scaling measurements off the drawing?

I would concur with one exception. In many States the Board has an executive director. Run your questions through them first. Direct contact with individual board members can make things complicated if charges are pursued. ..

"Survey not to be used for fence construction"

I would not consider it to be "scaling off the drawing" if the new owner pulled a string line between two monuments a licensed surveyor had recently flagged, to align the fence. I mean, if a boundary survey can't be used to determine where the boundary line is, then what are the clients paying for?

Oklahoma Minimum Standards

> Here, in Florida, I notice quite a few different "surveyors" that specialize in cheap surveys for banks put a note on their survey "Not to be used for construction, including fences",
Oklahoma Minimum Standards (245:15-13-2(e)) allow for such "Mortgage Inspection Reports" with the following certification:

‘This Mortgage Inspection Report was prepared for ...(individual or firm).... It is not a land or boundary survey plat, and it is not to be relied upon for the establishment of fence, building or other future improvement lines. The accompanying sketch is a true representation of the conditions that were found at the time of the inspection, and the linear and angular values shown on the sketch, if any, are based on record or deed information and have not been verified unless noted.’

And if that isn't bad enough, I think that it is even worse when a registrant who make a steady diet of these things tries to do a real survey.

nothing wrong with the statment IMHO

A young couple buys their first house and wants to put up a fence but are dead broke because they listened to the mortgage "professional" who said "sure you can afford this house". They raise a couple kids and 20 some years later realize that they can now afford to put that fence in they always wanted. So they pull out the survey from the closing packet. Hopefully they read that note and call a surveyor first because I'm sure something has changed a little bit in the past 20 years.

Perhaps the right thing to do would be make a rule that fence construction requires a surveyor to sign off on it.

nothing wrong with the statment IMHO

'Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign'
-Charles Sanders Peirce

>"Not to be used for construction, including fences"

Means whatever the reader wants it to mean; henceforth I'm going to take it 100% on face value as meaning exactly what it says: that an 8" x 14" piece of paper is a very poor construction material.

nothing wrong with the statment IMHO

> Perhaps the right thing to do would be make a rule that fence construction requires a surveyor to sign off on it.

I'd argue that when a surveyor signs a boundary survey, they are "signing off" that their boundary determination is good enough to build a fence by. I'd agree that 20 years down the road the owners should have a surveyor come back and "refresh" their memory, but these weasel disclaimers don't say anything about 20 years in the future, do they? The way I read it, it sound like they would attempt to relieve themselves from any responsibility and damages caused by an error, even if you started building a fence the moment they left the property... Is that what a professional land surveyor would do?

These MLS's are not surveys....

... and they're performed for the mortgage and/or title company.

The buyer and/or seller shouldn't even get a copy, since it's not performed "for", the buyer/seller.

Of course, I think the buyer usually winds up with a copy as a sort of disclosure that the money paid for the "survey", was actually applied to the "survey".

Even though it's not actually performed for the buyer and even though there are usually disclaimers(about accuracy & usefulness), I think I've heard of and certainly believe there have been suck-cessful rulings against surveyors when a subsequent fence was erroneously placed using these "specialty", surveys(? read: Mortgage Loan Services).

The surveying profession and the various BOR's really screwed professional surveyors when the devised special laws to allow these cheap services. No one had the marbles to just say ... it's got to a survey ... a "real", survey.

I used to do them and they can make good money ... they make even more money when cut-lines and existing fences are used as the boundary depicted on the Mortgage Loan Survey.

I think, in hindsite, that these services ended up making us look like toothless street-walkers instead of the professionals we really need to be.

The service is cheap
the service is very fast
the usefulness of the product is virtually nil
disclaimers probably give no protection(esp in a local court)
and cheap ... fast ... carap is not what I would want clients to think of when they think of me

You are correct

No matter how many caveats are included on the page, the users see that it was prepared by a licensed surveyor and must surely be something useful to them. All it really does is transfer a small amount of liability to the surveyor from everyone else involved. The document says it is nearly worthless, but, helpful people tend to side with the party who paid for something of value to be produced. Sometimes those helpful people are judges.

I'm not even talking about MIS's ....

We don't have "Mortgage Inspection Surveys" or "Improvement Location Sketches", or whatever they are called, in Florida. For title work/mortgages, you have to prepare a full boundary survey, or nothing at all ...

If Florida MTS allowed for a half-baked rough sketch of the property and house, in lieu of a real survey, then I'd have a different opinion of this note.

I agree Holy Cow...

If an enduser, who happens to be the buyer ... and also HAPPENS to be the person who paid for this confounded thing actually ends up with a copy ... very often to him/her it's at the least the closest thing to a bonafide survey.

Of course, smarty pants me, included a statement(beyond the general statement of worthlessness), that the buyer should only be given a copy to verify that the funds collected for this "service", was in fact "used" for this service.

If I remember right(LOL), there were issues with some title companies collecting the fee then overiding the exception without the "thingy" ... and without reimbursing the person who paid for it.

Also keep in mind that aside from the general inaccuracy of these "thingys", is that when pins are not found or found pins have been disturbed, any potential accuracy becomes virtually incalculable because a further search for neighbor's pins is usually not performed(except to get a general location as to where a corner "should", be. No further courthouse research is performed(almost always), and as screwy as it seems no "opinion", is stated as to the location of a questionable boundary(Ohio allows for an abridgement of a side line distance per the state's requirements if the expanded error does not effect the house being into B/L's and such things ... if it's bad enough, I show no distance, indicate if encroachments "might" exist and add a ditty that the property needs to have a boundary survey per Ohio laws to determine the correct boundaries), except that a boundary(by law), that is dimensioned to, needs to be within 1/2 foot as shown ... close enough for an owner to place his/her fenceline as gospel.

After doing these for a few years, I decided that I couldn't count on local courts to protect me(per state law), and I wasn't about to continue expanding my potential liability, regardless of the law or the disclaimers that specified or limited the scope of work.

Ohio should have decided to just enforce the existing survey laws pre-1980's.

Good enough..

Good enough for a 1.5 million mortgage BUT NOT a $3,000 fence!

> Direct contact with individual board members can make things complicated if charges are pursued. ..

If only that were true in this state.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "complicated". If you are referring to potential "conflict of interest" or something similar, well, all I can say is "ya right".

nothing wrong with the statment IMHO

:good: Great Idea! If you really want to memorialize the fence or building construction have the surveyor do the survey after construction and put detailed ties from the constructed object to controlling lines on the survey. My 2 cents, Jp

I'm not even talking about MIS's ....

My theory is that those notes are the direct result of the technique of showing a monument marker found, but then saying something like ".4' north .2' west" or some other such nonsense. They don't have the GUTS to just say that the true boundary marker might be a few inches "out" of the record bearing and distance.

They just mark everything as "Plat and Measured, UNO " KNOWING that the layman (and other surveyors too) looking at the map can't make heads or tails of those distances from the monument to the "corner".

SOOOO, installing a fence between the rebar in the ground could cause them trouble since their surveys might call those markers as somehow wrong.

I'm not even talking about MIS's ....

So your not supposed to report what you find? I thought we were experts in spatial positioning. If I find a monument 0.40'N. and 0.20'W. of my corner position, how am I to explain this, other than reporting said monuments spatial position relative to the corner? It's 2 different opinions on how to express the boundary of said parcel. Some people find the monument and report the varying bearing and distance and recorded and measured (or deed and field, plat and field, yadda yadda yadda). What if said distance was 4.0' N. and 2.0' W? Do you add 4' to your clients boundary? I'm assuming here that the monument is of course not called for in the description (or a PRM or section corner etc.). I think either way is valid, what isn't valid is to stare down one's nose at the way somebody else does something. We are all professionals, that arrive at conclusions. What vehicle you take to arrive at these conclusions, and they manner in which way you choose to report them are your own business.

Now that I'm off my soap box, I've seen this note more and more here in FL as well (just saw one last week come across my desk). In all, this year I've seen 6. The surveys (I use that term lightly) don't report much other than the everything is plat and field (recorded and measured etc.) and all the monuments are where they should be. I even saw one that simply stated "No corner found". No monument set, nothing, just "Well, we didn't find anything here". Problem I have is in the title block it states "Boundary Survey". In FL, that is NOT a boundary survey, by any definition. What is even funnier is the guy getting me to do the survey (because he couldn't find his corner, duh, the 1st surveyor said "No corner found") was freaked out by my price. He said to me "This guy did it for $250!!!" He finally agreed for me to do it, paid me. The job took me 4 hours to do and when I was done, he exclaimed "4 hours for 1 corner, that guy was only here an hour!". My point exactly. These are disturbing, and I'm with Pseudo on this one, I think the board needs to get a whiff of these. Of the 6 I've seen, they are from 4 different firms, so I'm not sure I'd say it was a localized event only. Looks like it may be becoming more common place. :pissed: :pissed: :pissed:

I'm not even talking about MIS's ....

I think you misunderstood my point. IMHO the surveyor either accepts the monument found in the field OR sets a monument where they determine the limits of the property. I can hear the pincushion argument already, so save it. I don't pincushion. I don't expect the boundary marker to fall exactly where the deed calls for, either. That's just not realistic

I prefer to label the bearing/dist in both plat and measured. I can explain to anyone that asks the legal and mathematical reasons for honoring monuments found. I think it's a disservice to our clients to imply there is some kind ofdifference between the monument and the "corner".
I've never seen 4 feet of difference, but if I surveyed in rural lands, I'm sure I would.

Andy

I'm not even talking about MIS's ....

placing a fence by monuments is one thing but placing a fence by the tie distances off a drawing is another.

I've seen many folks use the measurement from the mortgage survey to set the fence line. If the mortgage survey says 5.0' from the house, then 5.0' it is.