California Surveyors Forums

Lately, more and more title reports I get from clients do not specify the easements of record affecting the property. They have language in the exceptions that state something to the effect of "Easements affecting the land for the purposes stated therein as shown on the filed map or appearing in the public records" no matter if an easement exists or not.

I take it title companies are not even required to point out the specific encumbrances to the property, since I am now seeing this on 2 or 3 different company reports now. I was curious how others deal with this.

Any day now I expect to get a title report that says:

Schedule A
...
5. The land referred to in this report is: Your Parcel.

Schedule B, Section II: Exceptions

1. Exceptions to coverage consist of: Anything That Affects Your Parcel.

Please forward payment in full to: ...

LOL so damn true

Last time I read the ALTA standards, they placed pretty much the entire burden of finding records affecting the parcel on the owner and the title company, and almost none on the surveyor other than noting when visible evidence may indicate the existence of an easement of some kind.

Unfortunately, the reality is that of all the professionals involved in the land transaction, the surveyor is usually the least financially able to mount a defense to charges of negligence. Both the attorneys involved and the title company are all about minimizing their risk in the deal, which more often than being thorough (which costs $), means shifting risk to some other party involved in the deal.

Few surveyors understand how to appropriately limit their own risk to just those things that properly fall under their responsibility (many willingly take on a tremendous amount of liability when they sign the certificate provided by the lender, an attorney, or sometimes even a title company), and fewer still realize that they are the only player in the game who doesn't realize that the others are playing "hot potato" with the liability and they are all tossing it to him at every opportunity.