Don’t Let The Fantasy Of Owning A Home Misguide You
Besides your normal inspection, you will want to hire a boundary survey
to measure exactly where your property starts and stops. Why assume? Oftentimes people will purchase a home and discover their neighbor’s swimming pool, fence or new garage extends three feet onto their property. If this is the case, you as the new home purchaser can sue them. Not only will they have to pay you, they will have to pay several thousand dollars in fines to the city for violating the law. Had the property owner with the pool had a boundary surveyor come out and take a look at the property before they built onto your property, they could have skirted this issue entirely.
Time and again expensive landscaping and driveways are placed in the wrong place because the property owner did not hire a licensed property survey to do the boundary survey. These are the only professionals licensed to survey your property. Fence, pool and landscape companies are not permitted to do a boundary survey unless they have a surveying license. Once a boundary survey is performed, then at least you will know your true boundaries as well as your neighbors.
When you make an offer to buy a piece of land, it is usually a good idea to quote a certain price per acre as determined by the survey that is to be taken. Many banks will require that you have a boundary survey conducted before they will loan you the money to buy your land. If the bank does not require a survey to be conducted, it is a good idea for you to request one anyway.
Depending on what you are looking for, a boundary survey professional may produce:
1. Monuments at all property corners
2. A written description of the property
3. A plan of the property
4. A report explaining the basis of decisions and judgments made to determine the boundaries
The importance of a boundary survey cannot be stressed enough. Besides, once you purchase your house, it’s likely you will want to add on, put up a fence, landscape or put up a pool yourself and you will need a boundary survey for all of those projects. Avoid the headache, expense and frustration of defending a lawsuit, moving a building or tearing down an expensive fence, get a boundary surveyor to survey your potential property and start out on the good foot.
