How does a surveyor establish property boundaries accurately?
posted 26th November 2024
As a property owner, you want to ensure you know where your property boundary lines are. Boundary surveys are essential in providing you with the information you need. They offer accurate measurements of your plot of land, ensuring you know where your property begins and where it ends, offering you legal security, especially if you are planning a new build or you want to extend your existing property.
What are Boundary Surveys?
Boundary surveys are land surveys that provide the precise location of your boundary lines. The purposes is to provide your legal boundaries, ensuring your rights are protected. Land surveys carry out these surveys using legal documents, historical records, and measurement techniques. This is a very thorough process that helps reduce the risk of property disputes and encroachments.
This is an important survey if you want to buy a property, extend your existing property, or build a new property. It provides clarity, enabling you to navigate your rights with confidence.
Do I Need a Boundary Survey?
Boundary surveys are recommended for all pieces of land, whether you own an urban house or you have a rural farm. The most common reasons to hire a surveyor for a boundary survey includes:
- Buying or selling - if you are buying or selling a property, boundary surveys provide clarity that reduces any further neighbourly disputes
- Building or renovating - before you start any building world, a boundary survey can ensure any new extensions or builds are within your property lines
- Subdivisions - if you plan on dividing a piece of land, then a boundary survey is important to establish the boundary lines or each new lot, complying with local regulations, ensuring each property is legally defined
- Resolve disputes - boundary surveys are useful in resolving neighbour disputes over property lines
- Easements or rights of way - boundary surveys can help to determine if there are any easements or rights of way that will affect your property. This is important for access roads and utility lines
- Mortgage requirements - some lenders require a boundary survey before approving a mortgage bond, ensuring the property's boundaries are well-defined.
How Surveyors Establish Property Boundaries
Land surveyors use a variety of state of the art equipment to ensure they provide you with accurate results. The boundary survey process involves a number of steps, ensuring that they accurately determine your property lines:
- Research - Every boundary survey starts with research from historical records to title deeds. They research old surveys, historical maps, and other documents to find as much information as possible regarding the legal description of the property, any easements, and previous surveys
- Planning - the next step is based on the research gathered. The survey prepares a worksheet, identifying key information regarding the boundary line. This is used to determine any discrepancies between new and old property descriptions
- On-site survey - this is when the surveyor arrives on site using their state of the art equipment. They visit the existing boundary markers, establishing a control network, identifying the boundaries and corners of the property. Often they will mark the ground, so you can visualise your boundary lines
- Capturing the data - once the on-site survey is completed, the surveyor analyses the collected data back in their office, verifying locations, and identifying any easements and encroachments.
- Reporting - once all this data is collected and reviewed, the surveyor provides a detailed survey report, that can be used as legal evidence in the event of a neighbourly dispute that goes to court.
Conclusion
Boundary surveys are essential if you have recently purchased a plot of land and you intend building a new home, or you want to extend your existing property. These surveys ensure you, your architect, and construction company knows where your property starts and ends, reducing the risk of encroachments and disputes with your neighbours. Do you need a boundary survey or do you require more information on how we establish boundary lines accurately? Give MB Survey Solutions a call today and see how we can help you reduce neighbour disputes with our accurate and precise boundary surveys.