So yesterday I was looking at our tax maps when I noticed something weird. My neighbor Phil has always told me he has a pie shaped piece of property.
The red line represents what Phil and the neighbor on the other side thought was the property line, but according to the tax map, Phil has almost double the amount of land he thought he had. The neighbor no longer lives there as he has been trying to sell it for almost 10 years.
So when Phil got home I mentioned what I had found and we grabbed a 100 foot tape and started working from the pins that were set when we had our land surveyed.
We were finishing up when the neighbor happened to drive by so he pulled in to see what was going on.
We told him what we had found and his first response was those are just tax maps, those aren't accurate. I said that I agreed but it would probably be beneficial to get a pin survey for the back corner for a couple reasons.
1. Maine law dictates that if a person maintains a property for a certain number of years (either 15 or 25, I forget which) and the rightful land owner does not dispute it that the land belongs to the person who has been maintaining it.
2. You are trying to sell the house and it would be beneficial to know exactly what you are selling. We had two real estate deals go south because of this. The most recent being the camp land that we thought was 20 acres but was actually 14.9 after we surveyed it and when we tried selling our old house 10 years ago and what we thought was our land wasn't and the purchaser backed out. We ended up having to drop the price $20,000 to get rid of it.
3. If it has reverted to you which it probably has, well Phil is paying taxes on property that isn't his.
It was a friendly conversation and ended on a positive note, Phil said he would look for his deed and see if the measurements are correct.
When I got in the house my wife jokingly said I should I have kept the info to myself.
So was I right or wrong for even mentioning it?
other neighbor took the tax map and measured off from our pins, it appears the neighbor on his other side has half his driveway on his property, so now he wants to survey the whole thing, he does not care for the man who appears to be encroaching on his property and made the comment if that is the case he is going to run a fence right down the middle of it
this all started because the next house past the driveway home just went on the market and they say it has 9 acres and I wanted to verify that, our lot is 13-1 and the 9 acres backs up to ours, I was trying to convince the wife into making an offer
so the neighbor approached phil the other night, he found his original deed and seems we are correct, he offered to phil to extend the line all the way back to the corner and get it surveyed off so they would both end up with pie shaped properties
Phil is fine with that, my only question is won't that trigger a demand of payment from the mortgage company of both parties when that deed change gets filed with the county?
21 Feb ’12
Wow, you should check and see if it was all parceled off at the time or if the same surveyor did the work at this point.
There was a development down South that the original survey mucked everything up and it compounded over twenty years into a rather big mess. It took me a couple years to sort it out before I could sell the our house.
It worked in my favor but if I was a meany my one neighbor would have lost half his yard. Insurance, taxes and a few other things were all affected by the neighborhood having to rethink what they actually owed.
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