Question:
“I was looking at a house with a large yard that goes down a hill. I assume the fences would be on the property line, correct? That’s what the owner said.”
Answer:
While fences are usually on the property line, never assume that’s true for any given house.
And it helps that the owner said they’re on the property line, but how does he or she actually know? Did they have a survey done? Or did someone else tell them…someone who may or may not have been correct?
So here’s my take on property lines:
- The only way to ever know 100% for sure where the lines are is to have a survey done for several hundred or thousand dollars.
- In my 30 years selling almost 5,000 homes, exactly ZERO people buying those homes did a survey.
- If you live in a residential neighborhood of rectangular lots and straight lines, the odds are that the property lines of a given home will be in line with the neighbors’. But that’s not guaranteed.
- Unless you’re going to build something close to the property line, it probably won’t be discovered (or matter) if the fence is off a foot one way or another.
