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. 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). 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.. Unfortunately, those three small parcels happen to be ones that had already been transferred by W.W. to various others in the step above. 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. 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.
