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Frequently Asked Questions

Will the County survey my property?
No, County personnel do not provide this service. In order to locate corners of private property, a professional land surveyor in private practice needs to be hired. To find a professional land surveyor, one can search the internet, Yellow Pages, or obtain a recommendation from a friend or relative. In addition, the Board of Registration for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists publishes a consumer guide to Professional Engineering and Professional Land Surveying (http://www.bpelsg.ca.gov/pubs/consumer_guide.pdf). Sometimes professional land surveyors are referred to as licensed land surveyors, land surveyors, or simply as surveyors.

A surveyor will need some basic information about where your property is located, and will ask you some questions about why you think you need a surveyor. The surveyor will then need to do some preliminary research in order to provide you with an estimate to provide services. All surveys are different and are therefore different in cost. A surveyor needs to research existing surveys in the area, obtain your deed and all adjoiner’s deeds before he can even get started preparing for the field work. There is often office work related to analyzing the deeds and maps before going to the field to determine what monuments to look for and where to look. The field work entails searching for existing monuments that may be relevant to your deed, making measurements to those monuments, and relating those to fences and other land features around your property. The fieldwork is often only a small part of the total work involved in a boundary survey. The information obtained from the field survey is further analyzed in the office, calculations are done and boundary decisions made, sometimes requiring additional fieldwork to locate more monuments. Once this analysis is complete, monuments can be set and a Record of Survey and/or Corner Records be prepared and filed with the County Surveyor.

A surveyor has to treat all boundaries impartially. The surveyor cannot sway results in favor of his client. This could be prosecuted as an ethical and professional violation of surveying practice requirements. The surveyors job is to locate the true boundary on the ground according to legal principles of the profession. This sometimes results in the client being surprised or unhappy with the location as discovered through a field survey. A surveyor does not have the authority to “correct” such a survey, but can offer possible remedies if a boundary disagreement arises with a neighbor or if deed points and lines are found to fall in unfavorable locations, such as through existing structures. To learn more about these possible remedies, read about Lot Line Adjustments and Boundary Corrections on this website.

Revised 09/26/2014

Show All Answers

1. Will the County survey my property?
2. Where do I obtain a survey map of my property?
3. Will the County help settle a boundary disagreement with my neighbor?