I know this isn't unique, but this past week I had a fun one that I haven't had to deal with in a while - a deed that doesn't even describe the property I was asked to survey which has been occupied for years by the people requesting the survey.
Some folks are in the process of selling their house, barns, and about 20 acres that they have had for 9 years already.?ÿ This resulted in the interested buyer finding that the deed only refers to about 2 acres of ground in three small parcels.
Realtor sends me a copy of a survey that was done in 2009 for the party that bought the property at that time (prior to current owners).?ÿ The survey very clearly shows about 20 acres and runs exactly as everyone thinks the property should be, but refers to a source deed that only contains about 2 acres in three small parcels.
In researching the property:
- I find that the three parcels are not even in the area that the 20 acres occupies AND had been deeded off to other people long ago.
- Everything traces back to a common person (W.W.) who had multiple deeds with several tracts in the same general area.
- Several tracts he has/had were deeded back and forth with neighbors in what appears to be cleaning up some loose ends that would go better with one neighbor's property than another for access reasons.
- It appears that someone found the most recent deed with W.W. as the grantee and transferred that from the estate to the heir of W.W..?ÿ Unfortunately, those three small parcels happen to be ones that had already been transferred by W.W. to various others in the step above.?ÿ This decision also left the key parcel, the 20 acres, still in W.W.'s name.
- Since that heir, the property has been transferred another three times with no one wondering why there is only a couple of acres described but 20 acres occupied.
- A deed for highway right of way was executed by one of those intermediary owners which referred running with the lines of the deed of record, but the described property in the deed never even touched the new right of way.
Fortunately, the property is actually there and essentially as described in a much older deed, they just need to get some legal assistance in how best to clear the title issue up.?ÿ Unfortunately, the heir is no longer alive.
Aside from the research and figuring out what property I was actually going to be on, it was a fairly simple field survey as it is the center of a creek on two sides and road right of way on two sides.
Question #1: Have they been paying property tax on the 20 all this time? I mean, really, somebody must have been paying taxes. Hopefully, the correct somebody.
@holy-cow Yes. They have been paying the property tax. The Property Valuation Administrator has the property roughly drawn in to occupy the entire 20 acres. No question that everyone has (since the initial sale from the heir) been of the opinion that the 20 acres was what was being sold. The only problem is that they sold the wrong property.
Similar story, but on a much shorter time frame - I once divided a property into a couple of 1 acre+ lots for a person. There were two houses that the owner was splitting out in order to sell them separately instead of on the one tract they were on. Even though I noted the addresses and the color of the siding in the header of the descriptions (in addition to acreages and tract numbers from the recorded plat) to be extra careful that they deeded them out correctly, they still managed to deed the wrong house to each buyer. Fortunately, several years down the road it was realized and some corrective deeds were made to fix it up.
I'm stuck on the 20 acre survey referencing a 2 acre deed. Clearly, the 2009 surveyor didn't read the vesting deed. Hmmmm. But I'm not real surprised that nobody else did. For most people, including paralegals and attorneys, a legal description might as well be written in Greek.
Major bloopers happen all too frequently because, as stated above, the description might as well be in Greek. Any shortcut possible will be used. About 25 years ago we went out to cut out about five acres around a house on 80 acres. The client even sent us a copy of the deed. As we were laying out the tract, it hit me that something was wrong. Read through the deed again and found half of the house was not on the deeded property. Called the client to report he only owned half of the house but we would try to figure out what went wrong for him. The 80 had been split into three tracts many years earlier but, eventually, it returned to being the whole 80. Yet, the description was to be all three old tract descriptions. Only two of those made it onto every document involved in the sale of the tract to our client. At the bottom of the page, following one of the descriptions, was the word AND in capital letters. The third description was missing.
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Laugh for today: Almost hit ADD REPLY too soon. My first sentence above started out as: Major bloopers happy.......................
You’re supposed to read the deed??? Next I suppose somebody will suggest that the surveyor does his own research.
I'm doing one today, the GIS has the Smith's owning a large tract of land. The Smith's deed shows they own it cause it was granted from Smith to the Smith Trust from the Smith's original deed. However, the Smith's granted away the property to the Jones years ago. The lawyer was too lazy to get the land removed when he did the Trust. Of course, the Smith's deed is newer and that's all the GIS looked at. But my new ROS will fix it all.
Yup. Someone makes a new deed and simply copies the vesting deed from 42 years ago. Nevermind the three small tracts that have been whittled off and the new highway right-of-way (fee transfer) that are no longer part of the remaining tract.
I have twice seen a two story condo, four units on each story, sold as Units A to D, from left to right as seen facing the front. Problem is the unit desigantions on the doors were put in right to left. No one is living in the unit purchased!
I'm stuck on the 20 acre survey referencing a 2 acre deed. Clearly, the 2009 surveyor didn't read the vesting deed. Hmmmm. But I'm not real surprised that nobody else did. For most people, including paralegals and attorneys, a legal description might as well be written in Greek.
As a frame of reference, that surveyor from 2009 is the same guy I once called because he had no source of title listed on a recorded plat that adjoined a property I was surveying. I could not make them fit, so I wondered if I was missing a deed. When I called to see if the neighbor's deed I was using to match up to my client's property was the correct information or not, he could not even tell me the deed he was working off of since he didn't find one in his records. Yet, he was able to survey the property in that deed...that he didn't have.
Before the "report him" starts up, no need - he has passed away.
You’re supposed to read the deed??? Next I suppose somebody will suggest that the surveyor does his own research.
Where do you get crazy ideas like this?
Wow!
I was thinking I had a funny one that opened with....
That portion of the Qtr Qtr Qtr Qtr of sec 26, 25 feet south of the north line of said section and thence south parallel to the east line of the same section....
something has to be done to clean up and stop the stupid.....and the lazy too.
thanks for the share, that's awesome to read and ponder.
I had a buddy that bought a 5 acre parcel on a lake in northern Wisconsin. Real nice place. He asked me to take a look at it. Turns out that he took title to a 12' triangle across the road used for a snowmobile bridge crossing in the middle of a swamp. Nobody read the deed. To make matters worse everyone on the grantor's side was dead. I told him he had best get a hold of the title company to fix this. They took a big hit on it. Took about a year to straighten out. They finally found some long lost relative out west that had some authority to correct the documents. I thought it was pretty funny, the title company did not.
My brother-in-law bought a piece of pasture adjacent to his other land. The GIS shows a strip across it that he doesn't own. I looked up the history and found that a century or more ago most of this was wood lots for folks in town to cut firewood, 1 chain by 20 chain strips. Two adjacent ones went to the county for unpaid taxes maybe 25 years ago. He owns the rest. I can't get him to go to the county and try to buy the landlocked strip. Too bad you can't AP against the county. I told him to offer 10 years equivalent taxes for it.
There was another odd thing about the transaction. The deed gave him a 10-acre strip and a square parcel of 1 acre that had been used as part of the adjoiner's cornfield. He sold the 10 acres and nobody noticed the 1-acre piece for several years until I pointed it out and he sold it as well.
Reading deeds can be tricky, but I'd think any body ought to be able to learn enough to get a rough idea of what is being sold if they paid attention.
