Do you need a survey?

We earlier mentioned the fact that boundary problems can sometimes be really sticky. In fact they can be disastrous. Both buyer and seller need to worry about whether what they see is what they get.

If you say nothing about it in your purchase and sale contract, you may never have a problem, BUT…. Let me tell you about an actual case that resulted in both buyer and seller going into bankruptcy.

A good 20 years or so ago a man who owned a large upcountry parcel subdivided it into six 2-acre parcels. Each of them had frontage on the public highway, and all of them were roughly rectangular. They were also all of them heavily forested.

After a few years the buyer of one of the parcels cleared his lot and built a home there. All of the original corner pins were visible, so he didn’t get a surveyor to stake out his lot for him. Bad mistake! When he laid out his fence lines he connected all four of his corner pins, he thought. What he didn’t realize was that the two pins he used at the back of the lot were the wrong two pins, and as a result one of his side fences bisected his lot, and the other bisected his neighbors lot.

That’s not the end of it. As time went by, his neighbors on both sides built houses, and they relied on his fence lines as the markers of their boundaries. So his neighbor on one side was occupying the back part of his lot, and the neighbor on the other side was occupying the back part of the next lot over. Lots were sold over the years to new owners who had no inkling of the fact that what they thought they were buying was not what their deeds said they were buying.

At this point everyone was enjoying blissful ignorance of their impending doom. Doomsday arrived a few years later when a later owner of one of the lots hired an architect to work on an expansion of his house. The architect hired a surveyor to help him determine the building site, and the surveyor opened a can of worms. The existing houses had been built on the boundary lines between the lots, and everyone was encroaching on his neighbor’s land. The one who wanted to build sued the guy who sold him his lot, alleging a breach of warranty and fraud, and in no time the lawyers were making big money at the expense of the property owners.

Plaintiff and defendant in the lawsuit were both bankrupted by the legal expenses. Both of them lost their homes. Their bankruptcy filings indicated that the plaintiff owed his lawyers more than $70,000 in unpaid legal fees, the defendant somewhat less than that to his lawyers. The plaintiff had also sued the Realtors who were his agents in the purchase of the parcel, but the brokers had malpractice insurance, and their insurance paid their legal expenses. Lucky them!

Moral: Don’t assume you know where the boundaries are, unless you really do.

©Poelman & Langa (808) 242-7222, 1129 E. Lower Main Street, #104, Wailuku, Maui, HI 96793