Survey costs

[caver]

tbaiely,

I have two 20 acre tracts end to end. One corner pin is recent due to a land dispute between two other neighbors or something like that. On the the north side between my two sections is the Missouri Land Survey section corner post. Anyway, if I find the three other pins, I'm happy. Not sure what it would cost for the three other corner pins.
Looks like I can get the documents here from previous surveys.
MoDNR Land Survey Program-Land Records Repository

 

[BruceR]

tbailey,
Good answer, Welcome to TBN.

AlanB,
Who was giving you the $4-$500 estimate ? Was it the surveyor, or someone who was afraid the sale might fall through ? I'm an R.P.L.S. and get calls all the time from folks just wanting a "ballpark" figure for a survey. Not seeing the property or knowing what could be involved, I might say " could be anywhere from $400 to $1000 or more. Guess which part they remember ? that's right, the $400 part. Then too, Realtors ar notorious for low-balling the survey cost because they want the sale.
A lot goes into a quality survey which most folks don't see or know about. There is deed research at the courthouse, not just the tract you are buying, but each tract which adjoins yours. There is drafting, there is the cost of equipment and personel, and also, there is the Registered Surveyor who has to put his butt on the line when he signs your survey because he just accepted liability for that property. I have to pay $90 an hour for some pimple faced kid with a screwdriver to come and fix my copy machine. I am lucky to get $85 an hour for a three man crew with $40K worth of equipment.

As tbaiely said, there are a lot of factors which determine the cost as well. The shape of the property has much more to do with it than the acreage. A square tract is cheaper to survey than a long narrow tract. Folks don't stop to think about it, but a narrow tract will cost a lot more to fence too.

Sorry to get on my soapbox here, but nothing chaps my butt more than people who are happy to pay a realtor and a Title Co. 6% of the sale price ( and yes, that is built into the cost of your property even if the seller paid it ) and then begrudge the surveyor 1/2 of 1%.

Bruce

 

[dmccarty]

Alan,

I had two lines resurveyed in 2000. Each line is about 800-850 feet long with the pins at each end easy to find. Along with clearing the line they put in one pin at a point along the line that can see the end pins. If there line is clear that is. Its all woods. They had to find the corners to make sure it was right so they did a bit more than just clear the lines. They repined some corners on a culdesac and one line they found a couple corner pins so that they almost covered a 5 acre parcel. It took them a good bit of two days to do this. No work was required in the court house as far as I know.

This was a four man crew. I think it was $95/hour and I paid something like $750 or $900.

It was well worth the money. It kept the neighbor from putting his septic field on my land as well as fence. Money very well spent.

If this is woods, once the survey is done, keep that line cleared. One of the lines I was not able to keep clear and I'm going to have to have the survey crew back to clear it and put in more pins. I'm going to put in a fence along that line and the neighbor ain't gonna like it so its got to be right.

Later,
Dan

 

[AlanB]

Bruce R, the people telling me $400 to $500 are freinds of mine that buy and sell land fairly regularly.

I think were the problem lies, is that is what they pay, and the reason that they pay that is that they use the folks often, and are long time freinds, in short, they are getting a discount. The good part of the equation is that when I spoke with my friends, they just said they would speak with the guy they use and get me a good deal.

I think this is much like when I buy from the commercial lumberyard, if I call them blind, and do not reference who I am, or who I am calling for, there is one price, then when I realize what has happened and tell them my account # etc. it is a very different price.

 

[tallyho8]

Sorry to get on my soapbox here, but nothing chaps my butt more than people who are happy to pay a realtor and a Title Co. 6% of the sale price ( and yes, that is built into the cost of your property even if the seller paid it ) and then begrudge the surveyor 1/2 of 1%.Bruce

I would have been thrilled to pay only 1% or even 10% of the cost of my property for a survey, but the property cost $24,000 and the survey, which marked 4 corners by gps only, and no property lines, cost $6000.00.
Yes, it is a long narrow woody piece, but how do I tell where to put my fence?

 

[HomeBrew2]

... but how do I tell where to put my fence?

I'll give this one a try:

First, if you have the knowledge base, you could do as I did and buy an old survey total station, PDA and download free software to traverse each individual line and set your own line points.

2nd, if your woods aren't too bad, you could offset each line a convenient distance then, pull the offset distances back , along each line, to provede fence line points.

3rd, if your woods arent too bad and method 2 is not possible, you can use one corner monument and offset the other corner monument, which creates a triangle, which will allow you to proportion (prorate) the offsets required to get from the skewed line to the property line at any point along the skewed line based on it's distance from the beginning point.

4th, a combination of 2 & 3 can be used.

5th, hirer a surveyor and provide the labor to cut brush and do anything other manual labor he needs to set your line points.

6th, hirer a surveyor, assume he'll work like the 800# gorilla, have the education of an attorney and, the manners and touchy-feely persona of $5000 ***** and ... you'll get the corresponding bill. Whoops, tried not to add an editorial comment but just could not do it.

Please disregard #6.

 

[MtnViewRanch]

I think that this is like everything else. Regional and who you happen to get to do the work. I am in the process of a boundary adjustment, 2 forty acre parcels changed to a 70 acre and a 10 acre parcel. Well I call around and find a couple of surveyors that are interested in doing the boundary adjustment. One of them gives me a quote to do {this, that and the other thing}, says that all of these things will have to be done, he can have it done in about a month, only $14,500.

I talk to surveyor #2 and ask him how much he thinks that it will cost. His response was that he charges $1000 a day and that the total bill including the county fees would probably be 4-6 thousand, but he would not give a firm quote. Well this sounded better than $14,500, but I didn't like the idea of an open contract. After talking with him a while and seeing the type of person this guy is I decided to take my chances with him and hope that he could get the boundary adjusted for under the 6k. Well instead of {this, that and the other thing} needing to be done like surveyor #1 had said, it turned out that only {this} needed to be done. So while surveyor #2 was out doing his thing with the property markers he also marked the property lines at all the high spots on my property to make it easier for me to fence it.

Total bill, $4001, Turned out that surveyor#1 was going to do a bunch of stuff that was not needed and was going to charge me for things that the county did for free or for a small fee.

So here is an example of what it could cost, and that you have to be careful if somebody is trying to make work for themselves. { doing unnecessary work and getting paid to do it}

 

[tallyho8]

I'll give this one a try:

First, if you have the knowledge base, you could do as I did and buy an old survey total station, PDA and download free software to traverse each individual line and set your own line points.

2nd, if your woods aren't too bad, you could offset each line a convenient distance then, pull the offset distances back , along each line, to provede fence line points.

Homebrew, thanks for the advice. The older I get, the less I like learning new procedures and the longer it takes me to learn so the first option is out.
The 2nd option would be the best but I can't clear in a staight line over 200 feet without hitting a 75 foot pecan tree. And this piece of my property is 2500 feet long. The best option I have come up with so far is to measure from a neighbor's fence which is 200' from my property to my property ever so often to mark points on my fence line and then string a line between these points. Of course I don't know if my neighbor's fence is in the correct location either. I wish I had been able to get the surveyor to mark a couple dozen points on the line for me to work from but since he charged me $1500 for each point he did by gps this would cost several times more than the property cost.
All the available surveyors are busy in the New Orleans area as they have to raise each new house they rebuild which amounts to tens of thousands of homes and they have raised their prices so high and can do so many city lots in one day that they don't want to mess with acreage. Before Katrina I could have had this done for $3000 and now I can't get it done for $20,000. The $6000 survey I got is totally useless. If any of you are professional surveyors, you better come down here and work for 2 years and you will have enough saved up to retire.

 

[HomeBrew2]

Unless I didn't quite catch on to what you said, I think you've got it mostly figured out. But, instead of using your neighbor's fence as-is, pull your own distances from your corners to his fence to find the real offset distance

 

[BruceR]

I would have been thrilled to pay only 1% or even 10% of the cost of my property for a survey, but the property cost $24,000 and the survey, which marked 4 corners by gps only, and no property lines, cost $6000.00.
Yes, it is a long narrow woody piece, but how do I tell where to put my fence?

tallyho8,
Doing business this way is not right. Price gouging because of Katrina is a sad affair.
Your tract is a prime example of why we use conventional methods on rural tracts. We often have a difficult time explaining to clients that we can't just run out and set four corners with GPS. For one thing, the pine trees here in East Texas cause major problems because they cause false readings on the GPS. We still use conventional methods and run a closed traverse around the tract. That gives us a series of traverse points, or "hubs" at random intervals ( from dodging all those pecans on line ) from which we can then offset stake the property line from each of these points. On a tract like yours, we would recommend setting steel fence posts for stakes and then the land owner could stretch a wire between them and clear the line at his leisure.

I must caution you about pulling 200' from your neighbors fence. "If" his fence is on the line and "if" your tract lines are perfectly parallel to his line then it will work in theory. Sadly, it won't work in practice because the distance is too great. You would need to have a 100' steel surveying chain ( or tape ), be expert in it's use ( be able to know how much tension to apply and to keep it level when measureing ) and then measure perfectly perpendicular to your neighbors fence. I started in this business "tailing" a chain 25 years ago and have pulled one for many a mile and I would not attempt it. Without running a random traverse around your tract the only way I could see you might get by is to run a baseline down the center and tie all four corners in from that line. You could then calculate straight line between those corners and figure your perpendicular offset to either side from your baseline.

In my neck of the woods, I would estimate about $1500 for the intial survey and then time and matierials for line stake.

Bruce