

This could result in incredibly expensive title curative work in the future.

Some of the problems agents might see include leaving part of the property behind or including too much property in the reconveyance because the deed and mortgage are recorded with an incorrect legal description. Settlement agents use the legal description to determine which property is to have the title conveyed from the seller to the buyer. If there are two parcels of property with the same legal description, this is a potentially huge issue that will cloud the owners’ titles and possibly lead to litigation. In order to be valid, it must close, meaning the lines describing the start and end must eventually meet. Unlike a property address, the legal description is a totally unique identifier for properties. If a surveyor is working based on the address, they could be surveying the wrong property.” Using the legal description tells us exactly where the property is at by locating those certain permanent reference points, or monument points, to find the property. “Surveyors should never use an address to survey because an address could be wrong. Sign up for our upcoming webinar on land surveys to learn more! This is typically based on existing township grids and uses a combination of alphabetical abbreviations and numbers to locate the land.

Homebuyers and even homeowners may not be as familiar with this term, so here are some important things to know about this part of real estate due diligence.Ī legal description of real property is a way to accurately pinpoint where a particular piece of property is located. The legal description is an equally important tool for surveyors. It’s especially important in a commercial real estate deal, where an investor needs to know exactly what they’re getting, but an incorrect legal description can also have dire consequences for a homebuyer. Spatial Vision used ESRI ArcGIS with Python scripting to first identify the features that make up the boundary, identify a direction in which the feature was heading and then convert this into a written description of the boundary with appropriate text which connected the various boundary elements into a single coherent paragraph.Every settlement agent worth their salt understands how important the legal description is in a real estate transaction. In order to meet the tight deadlines for this project, Spatial Vision decided the best approach was to automate the process of defining the metes and bounds. As well as providing maps for the redistribution, Spatial Vision was tasked with preparing metes and bounds descriptions of the new electoral division boundaries. Spatial Vision recently developed metes and bounds descriptions as part of a redistribution of the Queensland state electoral boundaries for the Electoral Commission of Queensland (ECQ). Australian jurisdictions still use metes and bounds in describing boundaries of administrative areas such as local government areas, schedules of proclaimed areas, park proclamations and other boundaries that are required to be described in a government gazette.
