ASSESSOR LINES ARE NOT PROPERTY LINES

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if I had to guess, it is a lot of people. The lines on assessors maps, which are superimposed on maps, are not your property lines! Twice today I heard of people using Google Maps, or another mapping service which shows “Property Lines” to define property lines. One of these uses was right, more or less, and the other was not.

The first person told me something along the lines of: “We knew the four corners of our parcel had been marked, so we got out an app that shows the lines and our location and searched near the corners. We found 4 pins and replaced our fences using them and the old fence location. I think that is a good use of these tools, with the caveat that there is no guarantee that what was found are actually the corners, and there may have been errors in the initial survey. As far as risk vs. reward, I think this isn’t a terrible gamble to make. They used the tool to get them close, then found the actual markers. That saved them a few grand, and they likely (not certainly) have their fences built in the right place. This is in an area where if they were off by a few feet, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, and all neighbors were friendly.

The second person told me “We use the assessor lines to determine the property lines for our task”. This person does property inspections that could result in several thousand dollars of cost to one owner or another of a property. Surveyors have been saying it for years, and its gone unheard, ignored in the disclaimer no one reads when opening a GIS service: ASSESSORS ARE NOT SURVEYORS. Those are approximations of property lines at best. Please do not rely on them for more than a rough approximation of where the line might maybe be.