Real Estate agents will sell you anything! The "got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you" saying is absolutely true... I almost went to closing on a 3 acre parcel that had a "legal description" according to the closing attorney which stated, a rock and a tree and then some other trees... Keep in mind, this place had been strip mined for coal... There were NO trees left! Their only excuse for pressuring me into showing up at closing is that the state that was providing governmental services for the territory that the "parcel" was "located in" supposedly "allowed" the sale of paper with such a nebulous property description! I couldn't believe my ears when I heard it! These attorneys act criminally in no uncertain terms...
People! A piece of property has to be located somewhere! As an old surveyor once told me, tax records and GIS parcel shapes are NOT sufficient to buy some random piece of land... GIS means "GET IT SURVEYED!" 😁. If anyone makes a peep about your land, you are going to have to defend your property in court in order to defend your land in the real world... If you can't even describe the shape of your land in written form, it's going to be difficult to tell someone, where and how to "GET OFF MY LAND!". Property description is how the process starts.
FIRST: Every state has a special coordinate system which properties, located within each state administrated territory, are referenced to. This coordinate system is called the "state plane" coordinate system. These come in different versions which are labeled with a year number. These years might be decades ago, but the more recent, the better, as surveying methods and technologies keep improving every year
SECOND: Your property description, should have a survey point on your plat drawing called the POB or the "Point of Beginning". This is the anchor that ties together all the legal mumbo jumbo in the paper space of court cases/records/documents to the graphical and textual boundary descriptions drawn on your plat and sitting in file cabinets of your local surveyor to the real world stake out of your land. Make sure that the POB has COORDINATES! I've seen and drawn plats without coordinates... 😢 Yes, I'm sorry, but it's easy to do. If you start researching properties, you will see so many. Sometimes the surveying company or lone surveyor will rationalize it with the excuse of "best business practice" of making sure that all the trades consult the surveyor first before making any assumptions about property locations. If the local state has no requirements for it to be listed on the RECORDED INSTRUMENT (ie, the stamped piece of paper at the courthouse that makes the description "officially recorded/reported"), then you probably won't see it, as it gives too much away in today's digital world. It may be sitting around, moldering in some surveyor's file cabinet or backup tapes just waiting to be exhumed for that "expert witness" trial of the century where you face down legions of "state" lawyers trying to take your land or your house with "imminent domain" for another GD road or parking lot! 😉 REMEMBER! It's YOUR property, your plat, your money! You ARE the BOSS! Act like it! Get a red pen and bleed all over that plat with question marks, circles and notes. It's time to educate, those connected to government, about what we, the people, expect of them!
THIRD: The Point of Beginning, is only the BEGINNING... Next comes the property's "legal description". This is just a way for someone to describe the property shape in a written or oratory format... You should be able to take this description and draw out a shape that "closes" on itself. The terminology "CLOSES" is not a meeting at the closing office, or closing that next big business deal (well, maybe), or that TV show the closer... When a property "CLOSES", it means that the computed boundary, the drawn boundary, and the legally described boundary have been executed so well by your surveyor, that you can take his legal description and MATHEMATICALLY draw, on paper or on computer, a shape that has no gaps or ambiguities... and such shape can be drawn the same way from the unaltered description in perpetuity... NOW THAT, is a property description that CAN be defended in court. This is what you want to pay for. A good LEGAL DESCRIPTION of property, a good POINT OF BEGINNING referenced to your local state plane, and a GOOD SURVEYOR that can educate you about what you are buying and can help you defend your property IN court. It's BEST to have that last part in writing since surveyors get old, don't pass the business on to like minded individuals and sometimes surveyors die, leaving you with only their scribbles and scrobbles to defend your family's property from an eternity of over-zealous commercial tax assessors, squabbling descendants, angry/vindictive neighbors, overseas tax lien "investors", umm... invaders, fraudulent easement enforcement, imminent domain "takings", and a million other things multiplied by a million other someones that will make the ending of the Jet Li movie "The One" seem like a yoga workout...
FOURTH: You are NOT only buying land to have a nice place to live, you are crafting a space/time bubble to resist the TYRANNY OF THE FUTURE, and you get to select who will RULE SUPREME in your small corner of all existance. DO IT RIGHT! You are our last hope against the rising tide of EVIL... Perhaps from your Nostrheim will emerge the BALANCE OF PEACE that we all seek to live our lives without pain and suffering...
