How It Works

Have you spent some time trying to find property lines and locate survey corners before you found our website? It can certainly be a time consuming and frustrating experience. Perhaps one or more of the issues addressed below helps to explain why you are having a hard time. Our proprietary software that produces your approximate property corner coordinates addresses each of these issues.

Bearings on a survey are often not based on true north

A very common mistake is to assume that the bearings on a survey are based on true north. It is also usually wrong to assume that the bearings on a survey are based on magnetic north. For example, over half of the states are part of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). Land in these states was surveyed into "sections" in the late 1800's. When a modern survey is done in these states it is common for the surveyor to find a section corner and quarter corner and then to define the direction between those two points as 'north'. All other bearings on that survey are based on that assumed 'north'. However, the real bearing between those two points can easily be several degrees or more away from true north. As a result, if you try to find property corners by simply following the bearings on a survey, you could easily be going in the wrong direction!

For more information on the PLSS see https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/public-land-survey-system-plss

If your property was surveyed based on an assumed direction for 'north', then as part of the process of producing your approximate corner coordinates our software will rotate your property boundary to very closely match the artificial direction of 'north' that the surveyor used.

Additional software tools needed to map some property

Some property requires pre-processing before we can do further work on it with our own software. One third-party tool we use is Net Deed Plotter. This software reads the distances and bearings from a legal description and produces a highly accurate map. However, that map just shows the property boundary on a blank piece of paper since the Net Deed Plotter software does not produce GPS coordinates.

We feed that map into our own software along with the other information about your property and use all of that data to produce approximate corner coordinates for your land.

We might map property next to yours

If mapping just your property alone does not look like it will produce coordinates that meet our standards, then we might also map property adjoining yours. This is done for our own internal use and there is no extra cost to you when this happens. By mapping several parcels together in this manner we are able to produce the best coordinates for your land.