Do You Need a Survey When Buying a Home?
Transcript
So one thing that a lot of buyers always ask me is, “Should I spend the money on a survey?” And I tell them every single time, ABSOLUTELY.
Even if you look in that backyard and it doesn't look like it's needed at all, you absolutely want to get a survey. I'll give you an example:
So [I] just closed on a property. This property is right here in Lexington, and you look out the back porch and there's a beautiful pool sitting right behind the house, and then there's woods.
And you would think looking at that pool that was installed 10 years ago, that it was installed within the property line and there's no issues, but my clients had a survey and that pool was three feet over in the neighboring property, which was about 35 acres.
So this home was owned by a real estate investor who was flipping the property and did not get a survey when they purchased [it].
Well the result of that was they had to write my clients a $47,000 check to demo the pool and rebuild the exact same pool on the property line around the corner from the house.
So anytime you're buying a house, no matter if it looks – if there's a fence in place, I get that question a lot too: “There's a fence in place already. Do I need to get a survey?” Absolutely. It's worth a few hundred bucks.
And the other thing is to really make sure you're closing with a good solid closing attorney that is going to find these issues and guide you in the right way. So luckily we were with Gary Pickren over at [Blair, Cato, Pickren, Casterline], fantastic outfit there, and they found this issue, took care of it. We were able to get them closed and get them a new pool. So it all worked out.