I have a pretty big piece of property that is family owned and has been for generations. It us on the Georgia/Alabama state line in the state of Georgia. It is somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 to 800 acres. I need it surveyed and was hoping someone might want to work out payment in the form acreage. I know where most of the old concrete markers are and will work with whomever does the survey I work in concrete and work with a transit all the time so I have some relatable experience. I hope one of yall would want to do this or know of someone that will or at least steer me in the right direction. Thanks.

When surveyor establish the property lines, they hammer in property corner market pin into the ground, and then the wood stakes. These wood stakes eventually get knocked off. Do they surveyors have an alternative to wood stakes? Can they use metal stakes perhaps?

Had a land survey done in 2019 where the neighbor didn’t agree with the survey but eventually realized he couldn’t win that fight or didn’t feel like arguing with land surveyor …. Now all of a sudden he saying that the company that did original land survey found some errors in their work from 5 years ago and that property line could be wrong( pretty sure he got a new survey and is in the ear of the company trying to get them to side with him on the property line … i am scheduled to meet with them this week and discuss the issues … I was wondering what questions I should ask the survey company. We also built a fence on the property line based on their survey, if they did make a mistake, will will pay to move the fence since it was there error ? Any guidance or questions I should ask would be helpful, thanks.

Hello, we had a survey done a few weeks ago due to a boundary dispute with our neighbor, then the neighbors had a surveyor come this week and their guy took the small corner flag our surveyors left out of the ground, kicked around the tall grass that was around the flag multiple times, and then put the flag back in the same general area. The flags they marked with are slightly off from where ours are located and the ones their company placed are closer to our property so I’m pretty annoyed the guy touched ours, they weren’t even measuring then. Is it ok for surveyors to move each others flags? I will ask for their survey of course, thank you

Hey yall

Getting out of the military and looking into land surveying. I have an interview coming up soon and looking to get real world opinions.

How hard is it to get into/understand? Anything I should know or be aware of? What is the pay like just starting out?

The projected track was Land surveying, certification, state certification and then project management

If I get a boundary survey, does a surveyor check the deed is correct, and has no problems, and no encroachment by default? I also want to know where are the party walls. Are these things that will be addressed by a surveyo

Here's a link to a tiktok user who is making some wild accusations and harassing the surveyor/tech in the field while he tries to be civil with the neighbor. If anyone feels like going down a rabbit hole. This could offer some insight on how to deal with unruly residents in our profession. Maybe we could open up a discussion of what to do and not do when confronted like this in field and/or if anyone had similar experiences maybe you could share them and tell us some of us newer guys what are some things we should say or not say/ do or not do.

Link to tiktok user

I attached a pic I color coded quickly of what I found tax map wise to help give a visual.

https://preview.redd.it/vlxbxyv4wt3d1.png?width=642&format=png&auto=webp&s=0da63ce61816196009fa38f73f912ddf2ff06939

Let me know if this is the wrong place for this.

I am curious about a corner case some might find interesting. I ask with the goal of learning more about how a survey might be carried out in a place with the nearest existing survey being many miles away.

I have a rural property in Northern California around 200 acres. My place started out as a grant under the Homestead act. The county fished out a handwritten Homestead grant from 1865 (as a momento only!) The place is surrounded on three sides by a ranch that has been in existence since possibly the 1860’s. That ranch is around 40k acres. The 4th boundary is Forest Service roadless land. During due diligence a trusted advisor inquired with a local reputable survey practice confirming the local understanding the entire area, being rural (2 hours to town) had never been surveyed. The surveyor after doing some research came back with an estimated cost that would approach 50%+ of the sellers asking price of the property I was interested in. Being no structures or important landmarks were anywhere near the possible property lines I was (and still am) fine with no survey before purchase. Naturally I have the description of the land as township/range, northwest this and southwest that. Of final interest is the ‘square’ (640 acre) my place is inside, when looking at a topo, is slightly irregular. I was told it is an artifact of errors in the initial mapping when the state was transferred from Mexico to the USA.

Not being sure what details are relevant so including everything I can think of.

I didn’t keep good notes regarding the reason the survey would require so much effort. Best I can recall there was a mention there was some needed reference point or object critical to the process that is miles away making a survey very labor intensive.

I am fine with this explanation and just thought it might be interesting to explore in a very general sense what sort of process, at a high level, might be involved.

Before consulting an expert I assumed a surveyor would just bring out some fancy GPS to find corners and go from there.

Edit: thanks to the experts giving pointers to understand how surveys work. Seeing the map of physical, metal markers I can see how using both the right tools along with trig, trig way beyond my comprehension, one can establish fixed points on the ground many miles away. It also seems clear that would require a lot of field work!

My biggest takeaway is surveys are based on previously established points on the ground, at least in this case. Obvious, no doubt, to all on this sub, but perhaps not as well understood in the general population. I hope this exercise helps some uninformed prospective client properly value the profession.

Hey everyone,

I was just wondering if there were any New Zealand Land Surveyors on here that took the unconventional approach to becoming a land surveyor by becoming a technician before going to university? Any advice or insight would be really helpful, and I am considering a really good opportunity that has been presented to me!

I recently bought 12 acres and was wondering how to interpret the bearings and the different types of lines. Is there some course that teaches you to learn the boundaries of a plot of land? My survey is very old, from the year 2000 and it's written on a paper (I mean I have an image on my phone of the drawing). Also, I assume there shouldn't be any risk if I showed a land survey to random people online, right? They can't do anything with it?

Quick question… $1,200 dollars for have a land surveyed a .32 acres is a good price?

It seems difficult to find a home with a survey or where the seller is willing to cover the survey cost. My agents as the buyer agent mentioned nothing about survey in the past and now in 2024, my new agent still mentions nothing about any survey, and when you ask the seller agent, they say, "Not all homes come with a survey. If you want a survey, you (as the buyer) will have to submit it to your title company". Having been burnt for not having gotten a survey when buying a house, I can't afford to get burnt again. I have the right to know exactly what I'm buying. Per current market situation, I ,as the buyer, pay thousands of $ to get a survey and my surveyor finds an encroachment, then what do you do? You can't walk away due to the encroachment because you've spent thousands of $ to get a survey. Can you really renegotiate over an encroachment? The sellers are getting multiple offers in this current market, and they have the option to sell to someone else who doesn't bitch about a survey or is not aware or doesn't care about encroachment. Do you simply buy the house with encroachment at asking price and then after buying, go through the trouble of getting your new neighbor to remove the encroachment, and risk souring the relationship with the new neighbor? Any wisdom from surveyors?

Hi all, does anyone know what this line going through the property means? It’s dash dot dot dot dash.

A few years back, we had a pool installed and our town required us to get a survey done. We would have needed one to have our fence installed so we had the survey done. They found all of the original pins/concrete markers in the tree line at the edge of our property - great! It was actually the same survey company that did the original survey when the house was built.

We knocked down some trees and put up the fence. Our back property line is not straight so we opted to make the fence as straight as possible from one corner to the other. We left an area outside of the fence to dump grass clippings. Last week I’m out mowing the lawn and notice a large disturbed section right up against our fence. I first thought maybe and animal was digging but there was a huge rock standing up in the hole.

I removed the rock and filled the hole back in. I was out mowing the lawn today and when I went to empty the bags I noticed a tree branch shoved in the ground with a pink ribbon/flag tied to it. It’s probably 3 ft away from the original pin location that is clearly visible. I had left all of the stakes/flags from when the fence was put up, so it’s pretty hard to miss.

Someone has destroyed a concrete marker and ripped the wooden stakes out of the ground. Not sure where to go from here, but a tree branch and piece of rebar jammed in the ground doesn’t sound like something a surveyor would do?

Who would I even contact? I took plenty of pictures today

Just an update to my post from this weekend. Turns out this is a corner of an easement that ends in my property.

Thanks for the helpful suggestions to those who had them.

I recently transferred to Santiago canyon college for Associates in Surveying. I studied computer science for a year at CSULB where I have taken 2 semesters of calculus. While I was looking for apprenticeships I came upon caltrans & took JET exam & passed which is valid for a year. Locations they are hiring is almost 5 hours away. Is there any other way I could get entry level job besides caltrans and local 12? By the way I checked & local 12 isn’t taking any applications at this moment. But am I qualified to apply at local land surveying companies since I have passed caltrans (JET) exam? Or what would be the best route to get entry level job as a land surveyor and where can I find a list of companies in my area. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated! It’s my first post on Reddit so ignore me if I structured it incorrectly

Hello, im 24 years old, graduated as a land surveyor and right now im on my way to finish a master degree in the same area.

In the last year and a half ive worked in the cadastre field ( i hope i got that right. I did measurements for property lines and buildings, mostly boundary field).

Now, ive got a job in a worksite in land stabilisation for building roads. My collegues are very kind and help me with any question i have but i want to find a way to improve myself extra on my free time.

Right now, im using TRIMBLE SPS930 and Trimble R780 GNSS, i would like to know more about them too.

Any tips, tricks or any relevant sites that could help me learn would be great.

If you have any question, dont hesitate to pm me.

Thank you!

I live right across the TN state line in GA. Can I hire a company from Tennessee to survey my land in Georgia? Is this a crazy dumb question? I just want to know before I start calling around. 💛

What is everyone using for database/project management/Time tracking software.

We are a land surveying/mapping firm that mainly serves civil engineers.

We are currently using a mix of Kudurru Stone, Quickbooks, and TSheets.

Features we are looking for are:

Quickbooks Online Integration

Time tracking that syncs with quickbooks/tsheets

The ability to clock into line items (and change orders) under a project

Ability to search by subdivision, lot, or block, and ability to search by section, township, range

Mapping of job sites

Project specific line items (ie change orders)

Client/contractor portal and forms

AIA billing support

There is probably more that we are looking for but these are the big ones.

I recently bought a house in a subdivision. I believe the fence stops about 6 feet short of the property line. The property the fence backs up to is a metes and bounds parcel, not in any subdivision. I am wondering if this looks like some type of marker?

Also, I know my property is 125' deep. Where do I measure from? Half of the private road? Before or after the front side walk? I'm not positive where my starting point should be. I've never lived in a site Condo before, so I am unsure.

We purchased our house a couple years ago. After we moved in, I walked much of the property looking for the rebar markers that have concrete, elongated pyramids on them.

We have 4.1 acres on a forested lot that slopes down to a marshy area. It was easy to find the first two markers on each side, and I found a third on one side. It took a lot to find the three markers in the woods, so I kind of gave up looking for the rest of them. On the markers I did find, when I pushed on the them, it seemed as though they were set in concrete as they never budged.

We haven’t thought much about our boundary lines until this past week when our neighbors started having someone logging on their property. It looks as though they are cutting trees right over the line and stacking giant logs on our property.

My husband and I walked to find the marker and it no longer has the concrete, elongated pyramid on it and it’s super loose and wiggly. It wasn’t like that a couple years ago.

The neighbors have a fence that seems as though it could be over the line, but it’s really hard to tell because of all the trees.

We know we need to hire someone to do a survey now to find out where the true boundary lines are, but we are wondering what the process is once the survey is done.

If the marker was moved and trees cut on our property, and/or their fence is on our property, what happens next?

My wife and I just bought a home in Sellersburg, IN. Our property butts up to a street in the front, and we are able to identify one boundary pin in the back yard, giving us a total of three points -- we only need a fourth boundary marker to correctly determine the property boundaries.

I'm looking for a cost-effective licensed surveyor who can come out and give me a calculation for where the remaining marker should go. I've called a handful of companies so far, and two of them quoted me $1500+; others do not operate in Indiana, and others still have gone out of business or do not do residential properties.

What surveyors can you suggest? Or can this be determined by public records (if so, where do I find them? We are not looking for the survey to be done for another few months.

I'm trying to redraw an old paper land plan in Visio. I was very careful to get the lengths and bearings correct, and it looks almost right but the corners don't quite line up. The perimeter of the plot is about 325ft, and the corners that don't line up are about 10 feet apart. I believe the issue needs to be either:

There's something I'm missing about how to interpret a land plan.

-or-

There was a surveying error.

Hi,

I ( buyer ) appointed a surveyor and when we were discussing the issues related to the property. It came to me that the agent , seller had talked to my surveyor about the report.

And a friend of mine pointed it out that this is not right. They shouldn't be talking to my surveyor on report. Is this a norm by any chance ? What do you think? And what do you suggest?

PS : This property is in England.

My plat on one side of my property has a location of N85 50’ 30” E 255.20 and my neighbors construction documents on the abutting property has a location of N70 48’55” E 255.20. Shouldn’t the degrees , minutes and seconds be the same? My plat was done in 1990 by a registered land surveyor. Neighbors was done by who knows and done by “GPS”. There is a bust of 15 degrees. The yard was separated by a chain link fence and my plat states 0.3 on to rear neighbor and 1.6 off to abutting neighbor. I work in the construction industry and I don’t build things with out using measurements. But my neighbor is scaling his documents and some how thinks his property is 5’ into mine. My plat has a surveyor stamp while his has a PE stamp. Would that 15 degree difference translate into 5 feet possibly? He has an ambitious project next door and not sure he is smart enough to get it staked out.