A planned fence, a driveway near the lot line or an unclear property corner can make a survey important to a purchase. The first step is identifying which type of work the boundary question and title company require.
Choosing the appropriate survey
A survey answers where the boundary is and what sits across it. Title insurance does not answer that, and the ordinary owner's policy commonly takes an exception for exactly the things a survey would have shown.
If the line matters to you, buy the survey. If it does not, do not pretend the title work covers it.
Three things get called a survey
- A surveyor location report is the light one. In Indiana it is the product the title company usually wants on a one to four family house. It locates the buildings in relation to the lines closely enough for a loan policy, and it does not set corner markers
- A boundary retracement survey is the real one. The surveyor researches the records, measures to a defined standard, sets monuments at the corners and issues a written report. This is what establishes where your line is
- An ALTA/NSPS survey is the commercial standard, ordered for commercial property and rarely for a house
Ordering the first and expecting the third is the most common misunderstanding in this part of the file, and the price difference is what causes it.
What a survey finds that nothing else will
The neighbour's fence sitting three feet inside your line, and the fact that it has been there long enough to become an argument. A driveway or a garage corner over the boundary. A shed built on an easement, which means the utility may remove it and is not obliged to put it back.
A recorded easement nobody mentioned, running through the part of the yard where the pool was going. None of this shows on the listing, and none of it shows in the title commitment.
When it is worth ordering one
When you are buying acreage or anything without a platted subdivision lot. When you are going to build, fence, or add on, which is the case where skipping it gets truly expensive. When the fence line and the plat visibly disagree. When the property has been divided, or carved off a larger parcel, or passed through a family without formal filings.
When the seller does not know where the corners are, which is more common than it sounds. And when the title commitment carries a survey exception you would rather not live with, in which case ask the title company which product they need to remove it before you order anything.
What it does not do
A survey addresses the work within its scope, separately from a home inspection or zoning review. Check its date against later additions or improvements, since an older report describes the property as it existed when the work was done.
Consider the survey cost alongside the potential consequences of an uncertain boundary. A fence, driveway or planned addition near a line warrants a clearer answer than an informal assumption.
Where your line runs. That is a licensed land surveyor's answer and nobody else's, mine included. What a survey exception on your title commitment means for your coverage belongs to the title company that issued it and, if the answer matters, to an attorney. Whether an encroachment has ripened into a legal claim through long use is an attorney's question and an urgent one.
The note on what title insurance is covers the half of this that the policy does handle, and the buyers page sets out where in the sequence this decision comes up.
This note is general. It is not legal or surveying advice, and where a boundary lies or what an encroachment means depends on facts only a licensed surveyor and your attorney can assess.