While owning property means you get to add and subtract to it as you please, you first must know exactly where your property ends and someone else’s begins. To avoid neighbor disputes and fence-line wars, as well as unintentional road access blockage, homeowners wanting to stay free of legal issues should cover all their bases during the initial planning stages. With that in mind, here are five situations that may warrant the services of property surveyors in Texas:
- Buying property: As exciting as it is to be going through the final paperwork associated with property ownership, it’s best to take heed when the mortgage company requests a survey. This is because, without a mortgage survey to show buildings and natural characteristics, property lines and easements, as well as existing boundary issues with any of the land’s structures on another person’s property, they are apt to deny you a home loan. Anyway, it’s better to have these types of issues or building mistakes discovered now, because they’ll likely wind up being more expensive and a bigger hassle later on.
- Adding on to your home or building new construction: Whether it’s constructing a workshop or a guesthouse somewhere on your acreage or adding another room onto your main house, you should consult a surveyor to evaluate your property before starting a project. Particularly to avoid breaking any laws, it’s important to know how far your property goes—that is, you want to keep your structures on your property and not encroach onto a neighbor’s land.
- Involved in a neighbor dispute: If you did not hire quality surveyors in Texas to conduct your property survey (or you decided to forgo one), and a project ended up over or too close to the property line, then you likely have a disgruntled neighbor. They may not discover it right away—it could happen years down the road—but you could be legally forced to take down a structure due to setback requirements. Also, arguments about property lines may crop up when one neighbor builds a new fence without telling the other.
- Installing a road gate: Yes, it’s a roadway on your property, but there could be county regulations you didn’t know about, such as certain officials needing open access to a section of land that can only be accessed by driving through your private property. A surveyor can find out if a gate in front of your roadway is banned before installing one, even before you buy the property.
- Wanting to know exactly where everyone’s lines lie: If you live on a large piece of land and you’re thinking about making some changes, like building a fence, adding a road gate or erecting a structure of any size, it would behoove you to bring in a surveyor. Similar to dealing with property lines between two or more homeowners’ private properties, there are land boundaries for property owned by the state, county or city that may not be marked clearly. Making such property line distinctions well ahead of moving forward with a project can prevent wasted time and money.
For professional and reliable property surveyors in Texas, contact the team at D.G. Smyth & Company today. We’d love to help you get your project off to a good start!