“Hey, my phone says my property line is over here!”
We often run into issues where either a client or the neighbor of a client believes they have more or less land because of a property map they have accessed on their smartphone. We have seen, more than once, where one of these maps put a line through a house, driveway, or building.
Huntstand, onX, and your local county or parish tax maps can cause quite a lot of confusion when it comes to the location of your property boundaries. It is very important to understand the purpose of these types of maps and the origin of the data used to create them. Also, it is important to read and understand the disclaimers published with those maps.
Your local tax assessor is tasked with identifying, inspecting, and classifying properties based on their use and value. Part of this task involves preparing property maps and databases to index and evaluate this information. On a county or parish wide level, this is a monumental task. For each piece of real property in their jurisdiction there should be a deed, and within each deed should be a property description, also known as a legal description. Each one of these descriptions must be read, interpreted, and plotted to the tax assessor’s base map. Huntstand, onX, and other commercial applications source their data from these public tax maps.
The property descriptions used to create these maps come in a few different forms, each with their own challenges.
A ‘metes and bounds’ description is one of the most common. This type of description gives measurements, such as distance and direction, and bounding features, such as roads, streams, or adjacent boundaries. The quality of ‘metes and bounds’ descriptions vary greatly. Some are extremely precise, having been produced by a qualified professional, and some are errant, incomplete, or even invalid, having been produced by a layman or a pseudo-professional.
Then we have the Public Lands Survey System, or PLSS. This survey system was devised by the federal government during the infancy of our country to dispose of the public lands to private citizens. The general idea was to create a survey grid by which to identify and sell off property. In these land descriptions you see calls for “Sections” or aliquot portions thereof. There is not enough time in the day to explain the challenges that this system creates for us here along the Mississippi River, just know that nothing in the PLSS is ‘cut and dry’.
Other types of descriptions include subdivision, lot & block, and ‘LY descriptions. Each of these descriptions requires some special interpretation for mapping and location on the ground.
The mapping professionals that compile and plot this data for tax maps are doing their best to create an accurate basemap for the assessor’s indexing purposes. Before making any decisions based on their data, you should understand that they are using data that may be incomplete, incorrect, overlapping, or otherwise invalid, and they have to make some assumptions on that data to complete their work. These maps were never intended to be legal survey quality.
If you have a legitimate concern about the location of your boundaries, please, contact a licensed professional land surveyor.
