Highlights • Chapter 8 ½ 4
Chapter 8: LEGAL DESCRIPTIONS
Chapter Highlights
1. Why are informal property descriptions not used in real property transaction?
For a real property description to have legal effect, it should enable a competent surveyor to identify the particular tract of real property to the exclusion of all other tracts. Informal property descriptions, such as a street address, are inadequate for this purpose, and their use may result in confusion and costly legal proceedings. Therefore, informal descriptions are not recommended, and are almost never used in real property transactions.
2. What systems are used to provide legal property descriptions? Which is best to use?
Several systems that provide a legal description are currently used to locate and identify land, including: the metes and bounds system; the United States government rectangular survey system; descriptions based on a recorded plat; and state plane coordinates. The particular system used to describe a tract of real estate is generally determined by the method used when the land was initially surveyed. One system is not inherently better than another. If the owner of a tract wishes to sell the entire tract, the owner is most likely to use the description under which title was acquired. If, however, the owner wishes to dispose of a portion of the tract, or to subdivide the tract, a new description must be created. The important thing to remember is that for a description to have legal effect it should allow a trained surveyor to locate precisely the boundaries of the subject property.
3. Explain the rectangular government survey system.
One system used to describe real property is the United States rectangular government survey system, sometimes referred to as the government survey system. This system is employed in most states to describe rural and suburban land; the major exceptions to its use are the states that comprised the original thirteen colonies, Hawaii, and Texas. The federal government at one time owned much of the land in the United States. Congress recognized the importance of describing the public land in order to facilitate its management or transfer to private ownership. Therefore, starting with the Ordinance of 1785, Congress enacted several pieces of legislation that directed the surveying of public lands. The Bureau of Land Management in the United States Department of the Interior was given the responsibility of surveying the public domain. Surveyors were instructed to locate and mark by monuments a series of thirty-five points.
4. How did surveyors use the system?
Using the base lines and meridians, surveyors were to map a grid of townships, each six miles square, and within each township, thirty-six sections, each one mile square and containing 640 acres. Surveyors marked townships, sections, and, sometimes, even quarter section corners, with stakes, plates set into rocks, or cement markers. When the survey was complete, the surveying markers could be used for subsequent transfers of the surveyed land. The townships were intended to consist of grids containing thirty-six square miles. However, due to the curvature of the earth and the convergence of longitudes toward the North Pole, a township can be squarely oriented north and south, or it can be six miles square, but it cannot be both.
5. What is longitudinal convergence and how is it addressed?
If one were to use the length of the northern boundary of one township as the length of the southern boundary for the next township, those townships at northern latitudes would contain considerably less than thirty-six square miles. The Bureau of Land Management addresses the problem of longitudinal convergence in two ways. One way is through the use of correction lines and guide meridians. Correction lines (or standard parallels) and guide meridians are generally used every fourth township line to adjust for convergence by expanding the length of the southern boundary of a township to six miles. Each twenty-four by twenty-four mile area created by the correction lines and guide meridians is called a check and each check contains sixteen townships. However, correction lines and guide meridians do not completely solve the problem of longitudinal convergence. A second way to correct for longitudinal convergence is through the use of government lots. A government lot is a section that contains less than 640 acres. When surveyors were unable to create a proper six-mile square township, they were instructed to normalize as many sections as possible by working from south to north and east to west to make each section contain 640 acres. These adjustments are usually contained in the outside half of the involved sections.
6. What are township lines, tiers and range lines?
The boundaries lying on the north and south sides of each township are called township lines, and are numbered consecutively from the base line. A row of townships lying in an east-west plane is sometimes called a tier. The east and west boundaries of each township are called range lines. Range lines are numbered consecutively from the principal meridian.
7. What is the metes and bounds system?
Another system that provides a legal description of real property is the metes and bounds system. In this system metes stands for distances and bounds represents boundaries. This system was used for surveying much of the land in the original thirteen colonies and is also used to describe irregular parcels of land originally described by the rectangular survey system. A metes and bounds description starts with a point located somewhere on the perimeter of the tract. The beginning point is marked by a monument, either natural, such as a tree or rock, or artificial, such as a metal rod or stake. A good description will also reference the beginning point to two other easily located points using distances and directions. This provides a means of triangulation so that the beginning point can be relocated if the marker on the perimeter of the property is lost or destroyed. The metes and bounds system is based on the fact that a complete circle contains 360 degrees.
8. What are a call, an anchor and an adjoiner?
A call is an operational instruction to the reader that explains how to trace the lines that bound the tract. The anchor allows us to determine the general location of the property. An adjoiner is property owned by someone other than the owner of the subject parcel.
9. What is a surveying chain and how is it used?
Sometimes land descriptions include forms of measurement that are not commonly used. For example, some uncommon measures result from use of the surveying chain, a device that was designed long ago to make surveys made over rough terrain more precise. The surveyor’s chain, used in the United States Public Land Surveys, is a series of 100 links each of which is 7.92 inches long. This should not be confused with an engineer’s chain that is also a series of 100 links, each of which is one foot long. The surveying chain is still used today under special circumstances. The chain is comprised of one hundred links and totals sixty-six feet in length. One will occasionally see a property description that calls for distances in units of chains and links or other unusual units.
10. Explain a plat description and a plat map.
Individual parcels of land, or lots, in urban areas, suburban and rural residential subdivisions are usually described using a plat description, sometimes called lot and block description, lot-block-tract, recorded survey, or recorded map system. A plat map is a survey map on file at the County Recorder’s office, which shows the boundaries and location of individual properties within a development or subdivision.
11. Why is a plat map necessary and how is it used?
When a developer creates a subdivision, the land is surveyed and, after receiving the approval of local officials, the plat is filed with the office of public records in the county in which the property is located. In addition to showing the precise location, size and shape of each lot, plat maps show the name of the subdivision and provide some type of surveying anchor. Plat maps frequently indicate the exact sizes, locations and names of public streets, and the locations and sizes of utility easements.
Once the plat is recorded in the public records office, each property in the subdivision is identified in two ways. First, to precisely locate each lot, the surveys utilize either a metes and bounds description and/or a rectangular survey description. Second, either a letter or a number identifies each block within the subdivision, and a number identifies every lot in the subdivision.
12. What is the advantage of a plat description system?
The advantage of the plat description system is that it allows one to conveniently refer to a particular lot by using its lot and block number, rather than the more lengthy description used by the surveyor. Yet, if questions arise as to exact boundary locations, the detailed survey instructions are available for public inspection. The county recorder assigns each plat map a book and page number and places it in the survey books, or map books, along with plats of other subdivisions in the county.
13. Explain the state plane coordinate system (SPC).
Under the SPC, each state is flattened mathematically into a level plane. The United States Coast and Geodetic Survey has a series of stations in the United States. Any spot in the country can be described by reference to the conceptual grid of lines running east and west, north and south, from the stations. Location of any spot thus described can be quickly located by triangulation from three of the stations. This system is currently used to augment the other property description systems previously described.
14. Explain the global positioning system (GPS).
GPS, initiated in the 1980s, consists of twenty-four military satellites orbiting 12,500 miles above the Earth. The original purpose of these satellites was for tracking troops and weapons targeting, but in recent years they have also been used to plot accurate real property boundary lines. These satellites send radio signals that enable trained personnel to precisely locate any point on the Earth. However, sometimes advances in technology has unexpected consequences. For example, boundary disputes, not a common event in the United States since the settlement of our country, are increasing in frequency due to improved surveying methods.
15. What are datums and benchmarks?
Every vertical land description refers to a datum. A datum is any line, point, or surface from which a distance, vertical depth, or height is measured. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) uses mean sea level at New York harbor for their datum, but a number of cities have established their own datum for use in local surveys. The USGS surveyors set out markers known as benchmarks at calculated intervals. The elevation of each benchmark relative to the datum is recorded, thus eliminating the need for a surveyor to travel to the original datum to determine the elevation for a particular tract. These benchmarks are often used as reference points in metes and bounds descriptions.
16. Explain an air lot.
Vertical measurements are especially important for condominiums, an increasingly popular form of real property ownership, with the unique feature that the only property owned exclusively by any individual condominium owner is the airspace over a given tract of land. This area is referred to as an air lot. To describe an air lot, both the tract of land beneath the air lot and the elevation of the air lot above the tract must be identified. The land beneath the air lot is usually described with a map similar to a plat map.
17. What is a contour map?
Vertical land measurements are also important in land development. A topographic map, or contour map, shows the elevation of a parcel in detail using contour lines. A contour line is a line connecting all points on the property that have the same elevation.
18. What is accretion?
Accretion is defined as the gradual addition to land through the operation of natural causes; the washing up of sand and soil to form firm ground. The terms alluvion and accretion are frequently used as synonyms. However, alluvion refers to the deposit itself and accretion denotes the act. Not all changes in a river or stream result in a boundary change. If a sudden change occurs in the course of a river, the property boundaries remain as they were. Accretion also may occur on property located at the mouth of a river. Sediments may accumulate at such locations over time, forming firm ground and expanding the property.
19. What is dereliction?
Another way real property may be expanded by natural causes is by dereliction, or reliction, which occurs when a body of water shrinks below its usual high water mark.
Larsen • Real Estate Principles and Practices