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Determining property lines can provide you with information for needed legal changes to your home and backyard.
You may feel confident that you know your property lines just by looking at your house and yard. The neighbor’s fence and where you mow your grass all seem to match the boundaries between other houses on your street.
Now imagine being so wrong about your property lines that you learn your house is built on the completely wrong lot. Even smaller mistakes or discrepancies between documents can lead to costly issues if you and a neighbor disagree over the location of your property line. Here’s what you need to know about finding your property lines, and how to use the information once you get it.
From permits to purchases, being able to identify your property lines accurately makes it much easier to complete a project or move forward with a transaction.
In most official cases, having a new survey done is the way to go. “Let’s say, for example, you want to build a swimming pool, and you’re not 100% sure where that easement is. You could have a new survey done,” explains Cynthia Durham Blair, a residential real estate closing attorney based in Columbia, South Carolina.
When you purchase a home, it’s not uncommon for your mortgage lender to require a new survey to be conducted on the property. Even when that’s not the case, your title insurance company will likely recommend a new survey as well, so you know if the neighbor’s garage reaches over onto the property or if the outdoor kitchen encroaches on a sewer easement, which could be costly to remove down the line.
Blair says issues discovered in a new survey of the property may not be covered in the standard owner’s title insurance policy, but knowing those concerns before you close could help you decide if you need to renegotiate with the seller or walk away from the deal entirely.
Depending on how your neighborhood was founded, your property may have been separated from the land around it at the behest of a developer, by the city, county, or state, or even by a neighbor who chose to sell a portion of a large plot of land. A surveyor plays the vital role of establishing formal boundaries and marking them. When a property is legally split, the new property lines are established in a survey.
You and your neighbor may agree to change your property lines yourselves, though this involves a boundary line agreement, also called a lot line agreement, that involves deeding the land in question and changing the legal description of both your properties.
Before you fork over the cash for a new survey, there are a few ways you can find your property lines for free. Your property lines are noted in a few different locations, including in the legal description for the lot, which would be on your property deed and on a plat map, which is typically available through your local assessor’s office or planning office.
A property’s legal description is most easily found on the deed to the property, and there are a few ways the description can be written. It could simply describe the property’s exact location as it exists on the plat map, or it may include specific details with precise measurements that allow you to walk the property lines from a nearby reference point.
A plat map shows property outlines for an entire neighborhood or area. On a standard residential street, you can expect to see rectangles all about the same size lined up on each side of the street, which signify each privately owned property. Every individual property will be labeled with an identifying number, which is the parcel number assigned when the lots were planned for separate sale, and follows surrounding parcel numbers in numerical order. Your deed should note the parcel number, but you can typically find the parcel information if you look up your home through your local assessor’s office. The plat map is also your best bet to find your property lines online, as your assessor’s office may provide plat map snapshots through its website.
Being able to perfectly translate the legal description to establish the physical boundaries on your property can be quite the feat if you’re not trained to do so. Many properties have hidden markers at the corners that, if found, can help you follow your boundaries. When a survey is conducted, the surveyor will leave flags or stakes at the metal markers, which are typically buried or have a cap sticking out of the ground.
“In the newest subdivisions, (homeowners) can kind of do it themselves if they’re comfortable with a tape measure,” says Jonathon Lord, managing partner for Carolina Land Surveying, based in Little River, South Carolina.
Even if your property doesn’t have visible corner markers, you may be able to hunt for the buried markers with a metal detector. The metal poles, often made of rebar, can be buried up to 10 inches below the surface. Use a metal detector until it indicates metal is there, then dig to be sure that what you’ve found is the marker.
Before you dig for the marker, be sure you know the location of any buried wires or irrigation systems to avoid causing damage. The universal phone number for U.S. homeowners to request buried utility information is 811, and with a few days’ notice, someone from your local utility company should be able to mark county wires or pipes with spray paint.
Even if you know the location of your property lines, you should be sure of the location of any buried utilities before starting a project that requires digging. The Common Ground Alliance, which aims to reduce damage to underground infrastructure, operates Call811.com as an additional resource to help people across the U.S. and Canada know where utilities are located before digging.
For existing residential properties, a surveyor specializes in making precise measurements to locate the legal boundaries of a plot of land and any improvements to the property, from the house and driveway to a swimming pool or backyard shed.
Taking the details from the legal description and plat map, a surveyor carefully measures the legal boundaries of your property. The surveyor will bury survey pins if they’re not already there and often mark the spots with stakes or flags for easy use.
The complexity of a survey depends on the geography of the area, what’s on your property, and what surrounds it. In an area where homes were built relatively recently and there are few trees, a survey could be completed as quickly as 30 to 45 minutes, says Mike Stanley, owner of Stanley Land Surveying, based in the Huntsville, Alabama, metro area.
But in an older neighborhood, where lots of properties have fences and established trees, “a half acre could take you two to three hours,” he says.
HomeAdvisor reports the typical price range to hire a land surveyor is between $375 and $744, with the national average at just about $525. Depending on the size of your property and where you live, you could see that price rising past $1,000, according to HomeAdvisor.
Don’t use fence lines, driveway boundaries or your neighbor’s garden as a point of reference. Just because you’ve assumed that’s where your property ends don’t mean it’s accurate. “If the fence was built and they didn’t get a survey, they built it where they thought the line would be” rather than where it actually is, Stanley says.
If you’re looking for clues as to where your property might start and end, streetlights or telephone poles at the road are commonly placed on property lines. Similarly, many cities will follow property lines when pouring concrete for sidewalks by including a cut at the property lines, making each property have a complete number of sidewalk squares.
While these details may be more reliable than following your neighbor’s fence, they’re still not always accurate. Don’t consider breaks in the sidewalk or the location of a streetlight as a definitive marker of your property line without checking the survey first.
The publicly recorded documents that can help you find your property lines are typically available online through your local assessor’s office. These include the deed, which includes the legal description of your property and the plat map, which will show an outline of your property with others in the area.
If you and your neighbor disagree about the location of your property lines, the quickest solution is to hire a surveyor to provide a definitive answer.
If your neighbor is encroaching on your land and refuses to stop, you may want to enlist the help of a real estate attorney. Without action, enough time could pass to make the encroachment a prescriptive easement, which can mean that you lose the right to require your neighbor to remove a fence or stop using the portion of your property.
Source: realestate.usnews.com ~ By Devon Thorsby ~ Image: Canva Pro
Today’s homeowners are sitting on significant equity, even as home price appreciation has eased recently. If you’re a homeowner, your net worth got a boost over the past few years thanks to rising home prices. Here’s what it means for you, even as the market moderates.
Because of the imbalance between how many homes were for sale and the number of homebuyers in the market over the past few years, home prices appreciated substantially.
And while price appreciation has slowed this year, that doesn’t mean you’ve lost all the equity in your home. In fact, the latest Homeowner Equity Insights report from CoreLogic finds the average homeowner’s equity has grown by $34,300 over the past year alone.
And if you’ve been in your home longer than that, chances are you have even more equity than you realize.
While that’s the national number, if you want to know what happened in your area, look at the map below from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). It shows on average how much home prices have risen over the past five years, which has been a major driver behind equity growth.
While equity helps increase your overall net worth, it can also help you achieve other goals, like buying your next home. When you sell your current house, the equity you’ve built up comes back to you in the sale, and it may be just what you need to cover a large portion – if not all – of the down payment on your next home.
So, if you’ve been holding off on selling, it may be time to find out how much equity you have and how it can help fuel your next move.
Homeownership is a long game, and if you’re planning to make a move, the equity you’ve gained over time can make a big impact. To find out just how much equity you have in your current home and how you can use it to fuel your next purchase, connect with a local real estate professional.
Source: keepingcurrentmatters.com ~ Image: keepingcurrentmatters.com
It is highly probable that you will have to familiarize yourself with the escrow process if you are selling a home. Whether you have built one house or have a list of homes you want to sell, each real estate transaction will be finalized through the escrow process.
Escrow agents will handle the release of the property to the buyer of the new home, as well as the release of the funds for the new home sale once the transaction is closed. In this article, we will go over exactly what the process to sell your home(s) with an escrow service in California entails.
Below, you will find the steps of the escrow process for a new home sale. Although this process outlines the escrow process for the state of California, the list of steps written below can be applied to other states as well.
*This deed is crafted by the escrow company to meet all federal and state guidelines.
Many wonder about the actual cost of using an escrow service. Although the price depends on each specific transaction as well as the state it is being held in, a real-estate escrow process normally costs between 1% and 2% of the transaction price.
It is important to remember that the price you see an escrow company charge might not always be the full price you end up paying for your escrow service. Many escrow companies will add hidden fees on top of the percentage of the transaction price. To avoid this problem, choose an escrow service that is fully transparent with prices.
The escrow process can get even more expensive if things go wrong during a transaction. An escrow process that drags out can be emotionally draining for sellers that have spent years building a new home they want to be sold, making it all the more important to choose an escrow service that is fast and efficient.
As mentioned before, the escrow process can drag out considerably depending on a variety of factors, including state laws, what parties have agreed to, and who the escrow service provider is. In the hands of the right escrow agent, however, the new home sale escrow process shouldn’t take more than 30 days.
New home sales that take longer than 30 days to finalize will leave both parties in the escrow agreement in limbo while money sits in an escrow account. This can not only add extra costs to the escrow process but will leave all parties involved extremely frustrated. The emotional cost of a bad escrow should also be calculated when choosing an escrow provider.
The escrow process timeline depends largely on your specific transaction. However, it is also crucial to choose an escrow service that guides you through the entire process and implements technology that makes the escrow process fast, easy, and effective.
If you are selling homes and need an escrow provider to manage the transaction, then New Venture Escrow offers the easiest and fastest escrow in California. Contact our escrow experts and we will guide you through the escrow process for a new home sale. If you just need more help and want to learn the escrow process for a home resale or how escrow works when refinancing, check out the other resources available on our website.
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