While they are certainly not a replacement for a survey, how accurate do you find them to be?

Need to get my place surveyed but that is a ton of money so I have been putting it off.
I walked the lines a couple of times when I was young with gramps and know where a few stakes are.
I have the original survey from the late 20s or early 30s. Starting at the southwest corner stake next to the black walnut at the road going 200 yards northwest the the post oak, etc. aren’t too helpful nearly 100 years later.

Put my property in OnX and while I figured the trailer the neighbors put near the line was pretty close but OnX puts it WAY in to my property.

It depends upon what a qualified surveryor thinks. Those guys make a hefty living for what they do. They do not exactly bust their butt in their line of work. Of course there is ample liabilty for any error.

I was a surveyor several years ago. It's really hit or miss with OnX and older surveys. There are usually surveyors who do work on the side, and they're usually cheaper. Are you just curious about your property boundaries or do you need a title survey?

The shift in imagery to the lines is significant in some places. Typically the further North, the further off it is. Tens of feet in Alaska.

A boundary survey is typically fairly cheap. Even in Alaska, $600-$1,200 for up to 5 acres on a road system. Have you called to get quotes?

Does your local tax authority publish a GIS product online? Most Western states do. Generally plagued by the same shift problems for visual, but you can zoom in and grab a GPS coordinate from a corner, and most handheld GPS' will get you within 1-3' of that mark. Often, to help find property corners for our line of work, I'll grab surveys from surrounding and adjacent parcels to help triangulate coordinates. Essentially, surveyors do the same thing, except with an extremely more accurate system of tools.

What does your last line mean? "fired the trailer" Are you accused of something? You can hire a surveyor to make a determination of just what you need. That could be less expensive, or like many of us, if potential litigation is involved, the fees go up significantly.

I myself wouldn't go to court or defend an action in any correspondence with a potential adversarial litigant using a reference to OnX.

Personal curiosity. The property in ongoing anywhere out of the family any time soon.

However, I have always thought the trailer the neighbors put up was awfully close.
OnX shows it way on to our property.

quote:

What does your last line mean? "fired the trailer" Are you accused of something? You can hire a surveyor to make a determination of just what you need. That could be less expensive, or like many of us, if potential litigation is involved, the fees go up significantly.

Apparently it auto corrected figured to fired.

quote:

I myself wouldn't go to court or defend an action in any correspondence with a potential adversarial litigant using a reference to OnX.

Definitely not.
We’re talking hundreds of feet into the property according to OnX.

I’ll have to look at the county site when I looked years ago they were not online. It’s a super rural county.

How long has the trailer been there?

The shape of the property seems pretty close to me but the lines may have shifted 50 feet or more, depending on the time since the survey was recorded.
I bought a house 25 years ago and had a survey done. That one has had about a 50 ft. shift. The house I moved to 12 years ago was also surveyed for me and it's very close.
In fact, last week I was walking around trying to find a corner on my present home and found the old ribbon within a foot.

S2U is having similar problems in NC, but that situation has become adversarial.

Hundreds of feet is not going to be incorrect.

Without all the backstory, I recently became responsible for a property where I suspected neighbors were slowly taking ground (cutting trees and extending their yard). A boundary survey was the best solution. A surveyor walked the line and placed stakes with flags every 6 feet (at my request). It launched a discussion with the neighbor, where I was able to assert property rights in a non adversarial way.

You could ask them to mark the boundary just on that area. Let the markers speak for themselves.

A limited scope job like that might not cost as much as you think.

Guess I’ll look into the survey options. Probably best to do it when all the foliage is down.
It’s a pretty densely wooded area

quote:

Originally posted by LS1 GTO:
How long has the trailer been there?

Maybe 6 or 7 years. However that makes no difference.
There is no goofy adverse possession garbage here. Only way you can get property here that is not yours is if the land has delinquent tax payments for 10 continual years and you pay all the delinquent taxes.
Getting property Simply by building something or “maintaining” a property for a period of time is not ground for ownership transfer here.

I don't know about your neck of the woods but here in PA the surveyors often drive pins marking the property corners. I provided support for a surveyor that was marking the boundaries of a property owned by my sportsmen's club. Two things, the equipment used by the surveyor made quick work of the survey and the pins marking the corners were within 6 inches of where the surveyor plotted the corners.

If surveyors in your area use pins, a metal detector coupled with OnX may help.

I pulled out the documents as it has been quite some time since I went through them.

The last survey I have is dated March 23, 1907 and reads a little something like this:

The following piece of parcel of land falls in said county of Kentucky on the waters of Stinking Creek beginning on the white oak and three dogwoods corner of the 300 acre survey. The stone is placed at Jubilee Road and set out southeastwardly to the post oak near the corner of the King fence.

So it’s not going to be a great help.


I tried to access the property value administrators site and they want $24 a month for access.
When I get a chance to fiddle with it I’ll pay

They'll use other parcel corners in your area, and other known survey points. It isn't something most people can do themselves easily.

I bet we have several surveyors that can better describe this here. I recently shared a property line with a surveyor for a couple of years. We met on that line for beers often, and swapped real estate field work horror stories. Very interesting fellow. He plots and marks points on the North slope oil field now. A gen Xer like myself, he grew up doing it with math before fancy machines.