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My house was part of a 300 acre farm land that was split into plats about 4-5 years ago. I purchased my house from the original owner who built the house. The original owner was here close to 30 years and the lot next door was never sold. When I purchased this house 16 years ago, I did not get a survey because the property had been surveyed twice already (original survey, then 2nd one when he built the house). My deed has the legal description for the plat that is exactly the same as the original owner. About 8 years ago, someone purchased the empty lot next door. It is now a child care center. Everything was fine until one day a month or so ago, the owner comes up to me and tells me that he is “going to make me tear down my garage,” indicating he thinks his property line goes up to my garage. I contacted my other neighbor, who also has worked for the survey company that did the initial 300 acre split, and also did the 2nd survey when the house was built. He found my markers on the side in question and said according to the legal description of my deed, my property does go over an additional 5-6 feet past my garage. He said he was going to research the survey from the children’s center next door. He tells me that the deed to my property, and the deed to the neighbors’ are not worded the same. My deed shows the property line one place (verified by the metal markers he found), but the neighbor’s deed shows that his property line crosses over into my yard by the 5-6 feet, which is the property line listed in my deed. Everything can be traced back to the original owners on both plats. How can my legal description on my deed match where the metal markers are buried in the ground, and then I’m told the deeds don’t match? The center is on the corner lot and I’m the next plat. I’ll add that when I moved here, the empty lot was flat and overgrown since it was never sold. The center comes in and digs up everything, then builds the land up so the property now is at least 10 feet higher now. Confusing I know. What should I do?
It sounds like you are experiencing what we in the legal profession call a “mistake.” (It’s a technical term.) Somewhere along the line, the legal description for one of the properties got messed up. It will require some detective work to trace back to the error, and once you find that, it’s usually (not always) obvious where the real property line is.
