Should You Have a Property Survey At the Ready When Selling Your House?

A property survey is a document that shows your property lines, including any land, structures, and features that you legally own (versus that which you don’t own!) as a schematic diagram of angles and measurements. A property survey looks like a sketch drawn from an aerial perspective and may be as simple as four boundary lines with their respective dimensions. Surveys can also be more detailed and include past improvements to the property, topography, utilities, and more.

So, is a survey required to sell a house? You don’t always need a property survey to sell your house, but you can imagine how this handy little piece of paper would be a nice visual aid for potential homebuyers. Depending on your lot, a survey could also be necessary to clear up any questions over your boundary lines or easements on the property. Read on to find out when the property survey comes into play during a typical real estate transaction and how to obtain one if you need it.

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What’s the point of a property survey?

Generally, a property survey is not required to sell a house. Sometimes, if your lot is well-defined, you don’t need to bother with it.

“The majority of the time, we don’t do surveys on city residential lots unless there’s a specific reason that we need to,” said Derek Gilbert, a top real estate agent in Centennial, Colorado.

Property surveys in general, however, may help to add transparency to a home purchase. Here are a few cases and property types where a property survey might change the direction of a transaction, for better or worse:

1. Acreage properties

Rick Wilson, a professional land surveyor who’s owned a surveying company since 1981, says that he’s working on a project right now where a buyer bought 50 acres, but discovered later the fences on the land are all off by about 98 feet.

“Now he’s going to wind up in court proving his boundary that should have been demonstrated to him before he bought the property,” Wilson said. “It’s a lengthy court process, and it’s expensive. Any time you have two attorneys and court filings, it’s going to be an expensive deal.”

2. The property has some kind of unique hazard

An upfront property survey could save a seller from getting too far into a deal that later unravels due to unknown factors. In one case, after the buyer signed a purchase contract on a house in Missouri, he asked Wilson’s company to do a property survey, one that included looking for sinkholes.

As it turned out, the under-contract property was on a sinkhole-designated area. That means the underground water channel below the building collapsed, putting the property at risk for flooding and collapsing itself.

About 20% of the U.S. is at risk for sinkholes, especially Florida, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. The property hadn’t collapsed, but the buyer didn’t want to go through with the purchase and the seller had no idea there was even an issue to begin with. The situation could have been avoided if the seller had taken the initiative to get a property survey done before beginning a sale.

“If the seller had knowledge of the situation, he could have had a geotechnical engineering group evaluate the stability of the site and make recommendations as to the risks associated with the building,” Wilson said. “A stormwater engineer could address the flooding question. With full disclosure and planned mitigation, a buyer could be enticed to buy the property, although it might be at a reduced sales price.”

The same advice could apply to a property owner who’s selling a house in a designated floodplain.

3. Boundary confirmation

When you sell a piece of real estate, the size recorded with the title must equal the actual property size. Sometimes, neighbors accidentally build over the property line or fences erected on boundary lines encroach on the area designated by the title. A survey may be ordered to confirm the actual boundary and the discrepancy between the recorded land deed and the current boundary.

“We once had a property whose boundary didn’t match up to the title,” says Ralph DiBugnara, President of Home Qualified. “Turns out the neighbor added an extension to his home without checking the property lines. The extension encroached on the seller’s property. Needless to say, the deal didn’t go through, which was a shame because the buyer really liked the house.”

Ralph did not know how the property owner handled the encroachment with the neighbor, but in other cases, homeowners face the unpleasant prospect of tearing down garages, extensions, or fences built on neighbors’ properties.

4. Proper noting of an easement in the deed

Easements on a property are a “legal right to trespass.” Utility companies could have an easement on a property so they can access utility lines, or an owner of an acreage lot could grant access to their private road to a neighbor, creating an easement for them to pass through.

Easements can be an issue when you have to clear title and they’re not properly documented. Mo Choumil, founder and CEO of ATG Title in Fairfax, Virginia, recently ran into an issue like this. A local home backed up to railroad tracks and should have had an easement noted in the property’s description. But there wasn’t one documented, so now the house won’t sell without a correction to the deed, which would cost tens of thousands of dollars, Choumil said.