An accurate legal description is often the first stride one takes when renting or selling property. Protection against Potential legal disputes is most prominent thing that legal descriptions offer you. Also, when you are transferring property, you have assurance of identification. For someone who’s involved in real estate or someone in general as well, knowing how to write this piece of paperwork up is always going to be helpful in pinch situations and for smooth transactions.
But figuring out a way to wrap your head around how to write accurate legal descriptions that’s precise (and more importantly) easy enough to follow along is like walking on eggshells. Fortunately, we’re the guardrails on this tricky path.
What exactly is Legal Description of Real Property?
It’s a requisite to understand what the process of legal description entails. Legal description of a real property is a way of identifying, describing and locating a piece of property. This formal description remains unchanged over time, regardless of changes to features of the property.
Any land and anything that’s permanently affixed to it (such as buildings) is referred to as real property. Actual purpose of this document is to create an un ambiguous method of identifying the property that’s being sold or rented.
Why is it Necessary?
Legal description is not just a formality. There are plenty of reasons why it’s in fact a necessity!
Prevents Legal Disputes: Accurate descriptions helps avoid disagreements over property boundaries. It also helps when there’s a demand of ownership, for instance after a sale or rental.
Meets Legal Requirements: Transactions that require legal proof is another occurrence when a legal description comes into play. It’s a necessity to be valid under local and/or, government laws.
Clarity: It offers a clear way to identify a property even when other details change over the course of time.
For all the landlords out there, listen up! Attaching a legal description to your lease agreement is a surefire way to document the property being rented.
How to write it
Dividing up the task of creating legal description is the best way to make the process manageable. Some approaches that should be considered consist of the following:
Before anything else, it is necessary to turn to a competent real estate lawyer. The complexity of writing the description makes it vulnerable to containing mistakes, or even disputes by local or government authorities, which a professional prevents. Expert advice is still invaluable though, so keep that in mind too.
Description of the Land
In any legal description the focus is the land itself. It’s also referred to as the subject property. The step identifies property boundaries and uses one of the following methods:
Fractional Designation: This one is more frequently used to determine the result as compared to anything else. Rectangular surveying is likely used, i.e. when land is divided into sections and then described fractionally.
Metes and Bounds: This considers natural and artificial landmarks (like streets, rivers, or fences) and directions (north, south, east, west). For example “Begins at the oak tree on the northern divide, and moves 200 feet south to the creek, 300 feet west to the large rock and back to the starting point.”
Lot and Block Survey: The newest method, this divides the land into lots and blocks so that it can easily be identified. It may be practiced in either subdivisions or urban setting. For example, “Lot 4 Block 2 Sunset Ridge Subdivision”.
Select the most appropriate procedure with reference to the particular property and make certain that all the points of the boundaries are well described.
Quantity of Land
Though sometimes it is not essential, most legal description have quantity of land to be transferred included. This is typically measured as follows:
Acres: Used for large parcel of land mainly for commercial use.
Square Feet: Most often applied to buildings or to specific areas of a building/site which is less than the area of a typical building lot.
The quantity is another kind of information but is less critical than the physical property boundaries recognized by a survey.
Street Address
A street address may be part of a legal description, but it is not necessary. Getting and/or inputting addresses may result in confusion as addresses are not unchangeable. If it is included, it has to be in form of a guide and not as the defining parameter of the property. Thus, to overcome this shortcoming, more permanent address descriptors should be used, although the current address plan does not stipulate that the current address is invalid.
Suggestions for Writing Legal Descriptions
Accuracy and reliability are two important characteristics of legal descriptions. To uphold them, we have created a bunch of tips that will be useful. They are:
Use a Recent Survey: To avoid confusion, it is advisable to use the current land survey data to determine the description of the property.
Avoid Ambiguity: The more detailed the plan is, the better it is. Ambiguous or sketchy information can lead to controversies, or worse deprive a sale of its legal effects.
Double-Check References: During or after the measurements ensure that all landmarks, measurements or references made are correct and correspond to the survey.
Keep it Simple: There is nothing wrong with a detailed description but do not overdo it. That means avoid the complicated, academic language as much as possible.
Common Challenges and Their Solutions
Outdated Surveys: Usually boundaries and even the features of the land can shift over some time. To counter this, it’s best to always use the most up to date survey available.
Confusing Landmarks: In a description, if a landmark is not clear or there is none present or available, best thing is to utilize an option like the fractional method.
Inexperienced Drafting: Legal descriptions mean that writing the descriptions on your own might be somewhat off the mark. It is therefore very important to seek legal advice from a real estate lawyer.
The preparation of an appropriate legal description is a very important process in the purchase/sale of a property. By reading the above guidelines and involving experts, you will be able to make an accurate and legally correct description.
Please note that our objective is to give a definite and consistent measure for the identification of the property to avoid troubles and misunderstanding. Thus, the above information must not be considered as legal advice.
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