California Surveyors Forums

I just finished a boundary survey for the sale of a $9,000,000 home in Saratoga. When I arrived to meet the owner who was selling it, he showed me some documents. One was a perfectly good Boundary and Topo. It showed the property lines with many found monuments, trees, the house, etc. and was signed by a local surveyor. Then he had a Site Plan showing a design for an addition, pool and cabana - which were subsequently built and existed when I came to do the survey. The Site Plan showed the corner of the new cabana about 20 feet from the property line. Then he told me why he wanted the survey. He had been looking on a GIS or "google" or something - i am not sure exactly what it was - but it showed the property line running through the new cabana. So he was real concerned about that.

It turned out the cabana was only 15 feet from the property line. There were no monuments along the lines near the cabana so the contractor probably guessed a bit. I have received quite a few requests for surveys based on bad data from a GIS. So maybe they are not so bad after all!

Yep. I've had a few requests for surveys based upon bad GIS.

I had an attorney on cross a few weeks ago talking up his GIS image as if it was some sort of gospel, flaunting it in front of me like it meant something.
My response was, "in my professional land surveyor's community, GIS stands for Get It Surveyed."
The judge almost fell out of his chair.

I've done two recent surveys due to people looking at the GIS. One was the neighbor actually put in some kind of zoning violation on my client since the GIS showed the detached garage over the line. The other was because the rear neighbor was replacing the old fence and my client used the "measure" function to tell them how far her garage was from the GIS property line and the old fence had to be at least 5 feet off.

Maybe it is a Bay Area issue, not to mention architects using fences and giving homeowners bad professional advice, and not getting a surveyor involved before plans get approved. I've been burned, thus having to file a record of survey because of similar issues and finding material discrepancies in the boundary. I've been getting lucky and able to convince developers / homeowner's to do the boundary and file appropriate mapping before design, otherwise I have no problems passing on the project.