Doing a proper survey is one of the most important pieces of due diligence when buying free-standing property such as a house or townhouse. Buyers need to make sure that they’re not encroaching on the municipality’s or their neighbors’ land with fences, decks or other structures, and that they have proper setbacks for any structures on their property.
Not addressing these issues can cause problems down the road well before the buyer wishes to sell, and can invalidate title insurance.
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Surveys are a critical part of the due diligence process when buying a detached, stand-alone house or an attached townhouse because not only do you want to know what exactly you’re buying, you’ll also want to know whether you’re encroaching on your neighbor’s or the government’s property, and whether a neighbor is encroaching on your property.
The point of a survey is really to determine whether what you legally own per public records matches up with reality. For example, a surveyor will measure and compare public records to you or your neighbor’s fences to check for accuracy. Are the boundaries you see in real life accurate? If not, by how much?
All of this is super important to sort out because issues brought to light by a survey might cause the title company to raise an objection which can delay or prevent closing, or if the transaction goes through the issue could not be covered by title insurance. The issue could also become problematic down the road when the buyer wants to sell. Or perhaps the neighbor might raise it as an issue down the road.
So how common are survey issues? Quite common it turns out according to a recent survey of real estate attorneys done by Hauseit.
Our partner lawyers commented that it was quite common in places like NYC to see fences cross the property line. Sometimes in brownstone neighborhood like many parts of Brooklyn, this can’t really be helped. The fences simply encroach on what technically is the city’s land, i.e. the city’s sidewalk.
However, it’s a complicated issue because examples like this happen so regularly, and that’s partly because sometimes the steps leading up to the brownstone would be so short that they’d violate the city’s building code if they didn’t encroach on the city’s sidewalk. Kind of a Catch-22 for certain townhouse owners in NYC if you ask us.
Real estate surveys are a closing cost for the buyer, with costs varying based on locale. For example, it can cost on average $300 to $500 for a survey in the pricey NYC metro area, with a turnaround time of up to several weeks.
Pro Tip: Norms will vary by locale, but for example in NYC being up to a foot over the survey lines is usually considered to be acceptable. Anything over and the seller may need to work something out to clear the issue first.
