BOUNDARY SURVEYS

The National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying provides a very lengthy definition of surveying in their 2022 Model Law NCEES2022ModelRules. The New York State Education Law, Article 145, §7203 – Definition of practice of land surveying follows, “The practice of the profession of land surveying is defined as practicing that branch of the engineering profession and applied mathematics which includes the measuring and plotting of the dimensions and areas of any portion of the earth, including all naturally placed and man- or machine-made structures and objects thereon, the lengths and directions of boundary lines, the contour of the surface and the application of rules and regulations in accordance with local requirements incidental to subdivisions for the correct determination, description, conveying and recording thereof or for the establishment or reestablishment thereof.” https://www.op.nysed.gov/title8/education-law/article-145 It is our humble opinion that this definition is found wanting and that surveying was not historically and is not now a branch of engineering or applied mathematics. Because many surveyors in the past were also engineers and mathematicians, and vice versa, these disciplines have been erroneously conflated. Unlike engineers and mathematicians, land surveyors are typically not able to simply plug numbers into equations or formulas to determine the boundary of a property, aka the property line.

The land surveyor is ultimately charged with “following in the footsteps of the original surveyor”. The term original surveyor is a place holder term for anyone who originally created the property boundary, marked the line as such, and had the bona fide rights to do so. The ultimate question then becomes where we find the evidence of this property line today, at the time of our survey. Thus, the land surveyor, very much unlike the engineer or mathematician, embarks on an evidentiary exercise: gathering evidence, evaluating the quality of the evidence, and weighing the evidence to determine the location supported by the preponderance of the evidence. The breadth of evidence a survey may need to gather includes written record evidence, physical evidence, historical imagery, witness testimony, private records, and many others. Written record evidence can vary widely, and may include the following: deeds, filed subdivision plats, filed survey maps, state highway acquisition maps, county highway acquisition maps, mortgage documents, private surveys, survey field notes, Office of General Services survey maps, Department of Environmental Conservation survey maps, Department of Transportation survey maps, probate and will documentation, judgements, clerk minutes, town meeting minutes, railroad valuation maps, etc. The process of gathering written record evidence places the surveyor nearer to the historian or researcher than the engineer or mathematician. Physical evidence may include things such as; natural features on the Earth, like stream or ridge; natural objects marked by humans, like a blazed tree or letters chiseled into a large rock; monuments set by humans to represent property boundaries, like a pile of stones or a rebar driven into the ground; measurements made by a surveyor, like compass bearings and horizontal distances. The process of gathering physical evidence places the surveyor nearer to the archaeologist or detective than the engineer or mathematician. In most cases, but not always, the results of the evidence gathering, and evaluation will be depicted on a plan or map, providing a top-down view of the property, the facts discovered therein, the Surveyor’s professional opinion on the boundary of the property, and possibly any encumbrances.

Many people perceive the cost of a survey to be high when they finally receive a quote. Many other “professionals” involved in land conveyance, such as realtors and lawyers, take liberties to educate the public on “what a survey should cost”. The fact of the matter is that surveyors have not been proactive in educating the public and have long acquiesced to other professionals setting expectations for our services. Generally, a client’s realtor or real estate attorney has no idea what a survey costs or entails, and they are not an unbiased party in the situation. Also, unlike professionals such as lawyers, surveyors are not obligated to act in the best interest of their client and rather are obligated to the best interest of the public at large. Subsequently, the surveyor’s due diligence must be such that a boundary location is determined for the client without disrupting well established property lines of adjoiners or elsewhere in the neighborhood. Surveyors have a duty and obligation to the public at large, partially due to the fact that any property boundary necessarily affects at least two owners and also to the end that property lines eventually achieve a state of repose and limit litigious boundary disputes. Unlike the practices of engineering and mathematics, surveying is very labor intensive. Performing a survey requires physically measuring the property and adjoining properties, taking measurements of angles and distances between structures and evidence. It’s not uncommon for a survey to take several days labor out in the field. Large parcels can take weeks or months of field time. We take advantage of the newest technology to reduce this labor time as much as possible, without sacrificing the overall quality of the product we deliver. Due to the fact that the surveyor is beholden to the public at large, but mostly to the subject of the survey and all its Adjoiners, the professional opinion expressed in the survey must be as correct as possible given the evidence available. Due to this fact, there is significant uncertainty beforehand how much work will be required in any given survey. We price all of our jobs based on a full cost estimate, including how much time we believe it will take to complete a survey worthy of the surveyor’s seal. Overhead and profit are included in our estimate because a business can’t survive at break-even levels. Profit is required to fund new equipment purchases, recover from jobs that lost money, and to grow the business. We take pride in offering clients a price that is an honest estimate of the money required to do the job to our standards, no more and no less.

Prior to the advent of personal computers, computer-aided design (CAD), and high-speed plotting, we may safely assume that surveying was synonymous with the practice of marking/staking a property line. The ability to physically observe the extent of one’s land ownership would have been extremely important in the past. In addition, to have a map produced was prohibitively expensive for most. Physical marks or stakes or pins allow a landowner to know where his or her property line is located on the ground. This is not necessarily so with a map. The technologies mentioned above, and many others, have resulted in the production of maps to be dramatically reduced in cost. The labor of staking out a property only increases with wages, inflation, and commodities prices. As a result, through the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, the affordability of receiving just a map increased its popularity. Lenders and insurance companies came to be happy with just receiving a map to issue a mortgage or a title insurance policy. Fast forward to the present-day, the survey has become synonymous with the map the client receives and the stakeout is viewed as a luxurious extra. It is our humble opinion that the survey stakeout is as important if not more so than the survey map, because it is fundamental American jurisprudence, that in the event of a dispute, marks on the ground in the physical world will be presumed to prevail over lines and measurements protracted on a map. We strongly suggest that if any corners of a property are found to be devoid of any physical monument or mark that is determined to represent the property corner, that a pin or monument is set. If the setting of a physical mark is impractical or for some reason makes no sense (such as in a body of water or swamp or on the face of cliff) then points can be set on-line to the corner.

Yes, a stakeout costs more because it requires additional labor and materials. How much additional cost can vary greatly. The cost depends primarily, but not only, on the following: size of the property, number of property corners, the topography of the land, how many corners will turn up missing, the ambiguity of the record documents, and the presence of conflicting evidence in the record or in the field. We go to great lengths of research, preparation, and planning to be able to perform a stakeout at the absolute lowest cost we can. All of our field work is performed by at least 1 licensed surveyor and most of the time 2 licensed surveyors. As such, we are often able to perform our boundary determination in the field and stake the property on the same day or at least find ways to reduce the number of additional days of work that may be required. Our ability to do this is not common because the prevailing business model does not have the licensed surveyor even going out into the field to see the property, in most cases. Most surveying businesses rely on a model which puts the licensed surveyor behind a desk, reviewing surveys for final approval, managing employees, and retaining future work. We believe the current paradigm has arisen out of the disruptive technologies mentioned throughout this FAQ sheet. We also reject this paradigm and believe it does not result in higher quality surveys but lesser quality surveys. We believe we can offer clients a better, higher quality product and a competitive price. Imagine two surveyor expert witnesses taking the stand in a boundary dispute case, both are asked if they ever physically traversed the property in question, one says, “Yes I walked the boundaries and took all the measurements myself with my crew.” and the other says, “No, my employees do all the field work and I come to an opinion from pictures and coordinates in AutoCAD.”. The surveyor who answered “no” would undoubtedly have damaged his credibility in the eyes of a jury. Disclaimer: It is not always possible to perform a stakeout in the way described above. Some boundaries can be very complicated and require substantial time to evaluate and weigh evidence. The property can only be staked when the surveyor is confident that he has evaluated and weighed the best available evidence and arrived at a defensible professional opinion.

There are many reasons why two surveyors may arrive at different opinions for the same survey. This problem is an ancient one and the court made rules are civilization’s attempt to solve common issues with boundaries. An example might be simple difference in two surveyor’s measurements, this is why natural landmarks and monuments are given priority over measurement because they are less subjective. The boundary of any property is described in title documents, in most cases this would be the current deed, aka the deed of record, the most recent deed in the chain-of-title representing the last conveyance of the land. The descriptions of land, known as the Schedule A, can vary wildly. An example of an extremely vague description may be the following: “Bounded on the North by Smith, on the East by Johnson, on the South by the highway leading to town, and on the West by a creek.”. Any surveyor worth his salt should be able to take even a description this poorly written and come to a defensible determination. However, it may take longer time in the field and more research to get there. This is precisely where two surveyors may disagree and unfortunately there is no technical standard in New York state to be able to say definitively that one surveyor did not do enough work to arrive at a defensible boundary survey. It is our opinion that this is generally how two surveyors come up with different results: they did different amounts of work, both in the field and in their research, they collected different evidence, and thus their results are different. Another common reason that two surveyors arrive at two different surveys is psychological, as hard as that may be to believe. This psychological problem is not a new phenomenon and was first described by Justice Thomas M. Cooley in his lecture “The Judicial Function of Surveyors” prepared in the late 1800s and follows: “It is by no means uncommon that we find men, whose theoretical education is thought to make them experts, who think that when the monuments are gone the only thing to be done is to place new monuments where old ones should have been, and would have been if place correctly. This is a serious mistake.” [Emphasis Added]. This mentality or psychology that the surveyor must come in and correct all the mathematical and measurement errors of the past surveys is extremely ill-conceived. The surveyor is not charged with correcting anything per se but rather determining where the evidence indicates the original corner or line had been. The mental condition that Justice Cooley describes is alive and well over 100 years later. Like a belief system or religion, it persists. We believe that through educating our clients and the public that the mystery and esoteric nature surrounding surveying may have some light shed on it. Doing so would reveal some of the more correct practices of surveying and some of those that do not pass simple common sense.