If you are a lender who finances purchases of residential or commercial properties, you should consider requiring an ALTA survey Frisco TX for each property loan. Though many lenders require a title search and/or a boundary survey, you should know that an ALTA survey can give you more detailed and useful information about a property than a boundary survey.
ALTA/ACSM Survey Frisco TX: What An ALTA Survey Can Tell You
Boundary surveys show the boundary lines between parcels of land, but they don’t necessarily show improvements to the parcels. ALTA surveys are boundary surveys created pursuant to the minimum standards adopted by the American Land Title Association (ALTA) and the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM). These detailed standards allow the surveyor to prepare a survey that includes property boundaries and easements, improvements like fences, trails, roads, rights of way and other property features, the means of access to a property, the zoning classification for a property and the flood zone classification for a property. ALTA surveys can help you to ensure that your security interests and investments are protected from adverse claims that may not be disclosed in a title search. The information provided by the surveyor will help you — and the purchaser — to evaluate a property for the potential risks and benefits of ownership.
ALTA Survey Frisco TX: Concerns An ALTA Survey Can Help You To Address
Some of the concerns an ALTA survey can help you, as a lender, to address include:
▪ Legal Description: When you include a request for a surveyor to draft a legal description of a property as part of an ALTA survey, you’ll be able to compare it to the description in the title search to ensure that they are the same.
▪ Easements and Rights of Way: An examination of easements and rights of way shown on an ALTA survey can determine how they will benefit or encumber a property. Some types of either easements or rights of way can interfere with a purchaser’s intended use of the property. Also, easements shown on a survey can be compared to exception easements in the title commitment to confirm that they are the same.
▪ Encroachments: An ALTA survey can help you to determine whether there are any encroachments related to a property. Encroachments (the overlap of an improvement from one property onto another or onto an easement) are common and most are relatively easy to address, but others may be more difficult and expensive to resolve.
▪ Setback Violations: When improvements on a property are closer to the property line than ordinances allow, the owner has a setback violation. An ALTA survey will show the setback requirements pursuant to local zoning ordinances. As with encroachments, setback violations can be easy or difficult to fix, but they must be addressed.
▪ Property Access: An ALTA survey can help the purchaser to determine how he/she is going to access a property. The survey will show that he/she either has access to a dedicated roadway or that the property is landlocked. If a property is landlocked, you should require that the purchaser obtain an easement for access to the property before closing.
To find out more about how an ALTA survey Frisco TX can benefit you as a lender, call us at John Cowan & Associates, Inc. at (972) 635-4300. You can also visit us online at www.txsurveys.com to find out more about our surveying services.
ALTA Survey Frisco TX
John Cowan & Associates
10147 CR 135
, Texas 75762
(903) 581-2238
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