Property Survey Before Closing: Encroachments

A survey ordered in the first week of a contract gets drawn without the documents that make it worth reading. The 2026 ALTA/NSPS standard is blunt about the dependency: before a land title survey can be completed, Section 4 requires the surveyor be given complete copies of the most recent title commitment, the current record description, and copies of any recorded easements benefitting or burdening the land. Hand over an address and a closing date and none of that exists yet. What comes back is a careful drawing of a rectangle with nothing plotted across it.

Order it late and the other end of the problem arrives. Florida's contract gives you five days after you receive the survey, and no later than closing, to deliver written notice of anything it discloses. Texas measures your objection deadline from receipt of the commitment, the exception documents and the survey together, expiring at the earlier of that count or the Closing Date. Both clocks assume a document that arrives with time left on the calendar, and a survey ordered after the appraisal comes back rarely does.

So the useful question is not whether to get one. It is which of several very different drawings you are buying, on which day, out of whose pocket, and what your file does with it when a driveway turns out to sit fourteen inches over the line. Forms and rules below were read on 8 September 2026, cited with the effective dates printed on each.

Three drawings get called a survey, and only one of them will hold a fence

The word covers products with different scopes, different tolerances and different intended users. Two of the three announce their own limits in writing, which is the fastest way to tell what you received.

Ohio writes the limit into the drawing itself. Ohio Administrative Code 4733-38-05 lists what a mortgage location survey plat must show, and paragraph (O) requires a statement on the plat that the survey is a mortgage location survey prepared in accordance with Chapter 4733-38 and is not a boundary survey pursuant to Chapter 4733-37. The preamble at 4733-38-01 defines the product as proof to the lender and title insurer that the buildings sit on the land described in the mortgage, provided "solely for the intent of and use by the mortgagee and/or title insuror," and adds that it is only a professional opinion those parties may use as a guide. Under 4733-38-03 the surveyor need not set boundary monumentation unless the client asks. The tolerances in 4733-38-04 are two-tenths of a foot for major improvements and one-half of a foot for their location: fine for confirming a house sits on its lot, useless for arguing about six inches.

It does look at encroachments, which is why the document confuses people. Paragraph (K) requires that apparent encroachments be noted and shown in an obvious manner, and (N) requires fences or other evidence of possession to be shown when not in substantial conformance with the legal description. So it can tell you there is a problem while being the wrong document to settle it.

Colorado's version is a statute rather than a note. Under C.R.S. 38-51-108, an improvement location certificate "shall not be designated as or construed as being a land survey plat or improvement survey plat," must be prominently labeled as what it is, and must say that "it is not to be relied upon for the establishment of fence, building, or other future improvement lines." The certificate is valid only for use by the named individual or firm, and describes the parcel's appearance on a stated date. Read that last part as a sentence about you: if the certificate names the lender and the title company, you are reading someone else's document over their shoulder.

What the 2026 standard makes a surveyor walk, and what stays optional

The 2026 Minimum Standard Detail Requirements for ALTA/NSPS Land Title Surveys took effect 23 February 2026 and replaced the 2021 edition; the published PDF is marked v. 11.25.2025 and runs eleven pages. A survey under it is four things at once, per Section 1: the fieldwork in Section 5, the plat in Section 6, whatever Table A items the client asked for, and the certification in Section 7.

Most of what matters near a boundary line lives in Section 5.C. Item ii requires the character and location of all walls, buildings, fences and other improvements within five feet of each side of the boundary lines. Item iii adds potentially encroaching structural appurtenances and projections — the standard's own examples are fire escapes, bay windows, doors that open out, flue pipes, stoops, eaves, cornices, areaways, steps and trim — by or onto adjoining property, or onto rights of way, easements or setback lines disclosed in the documents. Section 5.B.v covers potentially encroaching driveways and other ways of access from adjoining properties.

The two encroachment clauses open on the same eight words — Without expressing a legal opinion as to ownership or nature — while the five-foot clause carries no such qualifier, because it asks for nothing but a measurement. The surveyor measures and draws. Whether a neighbor has acquired a right to keep the fence where it is happens to be a legal question, and nobody on the survey crew is answering it.

Precision is a number here. Section 3.E.v sets the maximum allowable Relative Positional Precision at 2 cm (0.07 feet) plus 50 parts per million of the direct distance between the two corners being tested, and requires a note on the plat where site conditions make that unachievable — the gap between this product and Ohio's mortgage-purpose drawing, in hundredths of a foot.

Two things buyers assume are included are optional and priced separately. Table A item 1 — monuments placed at all major corners, unless already marked — is a checkbox, so an unchecked box means no pins were set and you will not find your corners in the grass. Items 6(a) and 6(b), zoning classification and setbacks, are shown only if the client supplies a zoning report or letter; nobody is sent to city hall to look them up. And the Section 7 certification is addressed "To (name of insured, if known), (name of lender, if known), (name of insurer, if known), (names of others as negotiated with the client)" — a list you have to be put on deliberately, before the plat is drawn.

New in this edition, and worth asking for by number: Table A item 20, which puts the designated conditions and potential encroachments in a table on the face of the plat with a means of locating each on the drawing. ALTA's 2026 FAQ document, dated 01-05-2026 lists it as newly included, renumbers the old item 20 to 21, and contains the frankest line in the whole set: the survey "is ordered by the buyer or seller whereas the primary consumer of the survey will be the lender and title insurer."

The checkbox in your contract that decides who orders and who pays

Nobody orders a survey until somebody has decided who is paying, and the 2026 standard makes that formal. Section 2 requires the client to request the survey, to provide written authorization to proceed from whoever is responsible for paying, and to state in the request that a "2026 ALTA/NSPS LAND TITLE SURVEY" is required together with the Table A items wanted. It adds that the insurer is not responsible for the cost unless it authorized it in writing.

Your contract has already answered most of this in checkboxes.

Texas. TREC Form 20-19, effective 07/01/2026, gives Paragraph 6C three boxes and says to check one only. Box (1): within a fill-in number of days after the Effective Date, Seller furnishes its existing survey plus the T-47 Affidavit or T-47.1 Declaration promulgated by the Texas Department of Insurance. Fail to furnish both in time and Buyer obtains a new survey at Seller's expense no later than 3 days before the Closing Date; if the title company or Buyer's lender refuses the existing survey or the affidavit, the new survey comes at Seller's or Buyer's expense — another checkbox — on that same deadline. Box (2): Buyer obtains one at Buyer's expense within a fill-in number of days, and is deemed to receive it on the date of actual receipt or the date specified, whichever is earlier. Box (3): Seller furnishes a new survey at Seller's expense within a fill-in number of days.

Colorado. The Real Estate Commission's CBS1 contract for use on or after January 1, 2026 puts the subject in Section 9 and makes it opt-in: if the box is checked, either a New Improvement Location Certificate or a New Survey "in the form of ______" is required. Then 9.1.1 checks off who orders, 9.1.2 who pays, 9.1.3 names the delivery deadline and everyone who receives a copy, and 9.1.4 requires certification to all of them. Section 9.2 lets the buyer waive it in sole subjective discretion, so long as the seller has not yet incurred cost.

Florida. The Florida Realtors/Florida Bar "AS IS" Residential Contract (ASIS-7x) is the least structured of the three. Paragraph 9(d) says that at least 5 days prior to the Closing Date, Buyer may, at Buyer's expense, have the property surveyed and certified by a registered Florida surveyor, and that a survey the seller already holds is copied over within 5 days after the Effective Date. No orderer, no negotiated deadline, and the permission expires five days before closing. Check the footer of the copy you are handed: the form was revised in February 2026, and the redline Florida Realtors published changes the FinCEN reporting paragraph at 9(c)(iii) and leaves the survey and title standards below exactly as they read in Rev. 12/24.

The clause that catches people is the one in Colorado's form that reads like a favour. Waiving the survey while the seller has spent nothing is the cheapest decision on that page, and the only one whose consequence has no expiry date. A fence in the wrong place stays there after you own it, and the next person to find it is your own buyer's surveyor, years later, with your name on the deed.

Your lender may not want a survey, which is not the same as not needing one

Here is the mechanism most consumer articles skip. Fannie Mae's Selling Guide B7-2-05, Title Exceptions and Impediments, dated 07/06/2022, says Fannie Mae will not purchase or securitize a loan secured by property with an unacceptable title impediment, "particularly unpaid real estate taxes and survey exceptions." Then it hands lenders the workaround: where surveys are not commonly required in a jurisdiction the lender must provide an ALTA 9 Endorsement, and where neither is customary, the policy must simply carry no survey exception.

Check that form number against ALTA's published list, which on 8 September 2026 carried Endorsement 9-06, Restrictions, Encroachments, Minerals – Loan Policy (04-02-2012) alongside its successor in the 2021 series, ALTA 9 v. 01.00, effective 08-01-2025 — so ask which one your company issues before you ask anything else. Either way the title is the answer: the owner's-policy forms numbered beside them, 9.1-06 and 9.2-06, are the ones called Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions. The endorsement substituted for the measurement is a loan-policy form, and a loan policy insures the lender's lien rather than your lot lines. The owner's-side numbers to ask about are the 28 series — 28.1-06 Encroachments – Boundaries and Easements (04-02-12), reissued as ALTA 28.1 v. 01.00 in 2021, plus 28.2-06 and 28.3-06 — and 25-06 Same as Survey (10-16-08), which ties the land in the policy to the land on the plat. Before assuming any of them solves a fence, ask for the form and read its own definition of Improvement: a definition built around buildings does not automatically reach a run of chain-link.

B7-2-05 is also where you learn how small an encroachment has to be before a conventional lender stops caring. Its list of minor impediments accepts encroachments of one foot or less on adjoining property by eaves, other overhanging projections or driveways, provided there is at least ten feet of clearance between the buildings and the affected line, and accepts encroachments consisting only of hedges or removable fences. Those thresholds decide whether your loan officer sounds concerned. They say nothing about whether you can build, or whether the neighbor can sue.

Worth keeping straight: the appraiser is doing none of this. That visit produces a sketch with exterior dimensions and a value opinion written for the lender, which is a different report with a different intended user, and boundary location sits nowhere in its scope.

A fence over the line becomes a title defect on a clock

Once the plat shows something crossing a line, your contract stops treating it as a survey question and starts treating it as a title question — on the shorter of the two deadlines.

Florida is the tidiest example. STANDARD B of ASIS-7x provides that if the Survey discloses encroachments on the property, or that improvements on it encroach on setback lines, easements or lands of others, or violate restrictions, covenants or governmental regulations described in STANDARD A, Buyer must deliver written notice together with a copy of the Survey within 5 days after receipt, but no later than Closing. Do that and the matters identified become a title defect running through STANDARD A's machinery: a 30-day Cure Period, then five days for the buyer to extend the cure by up to 120 days, accept title with the defect, or terminate and take the deposit back. Miss the five days and the same standard works in silence — a buyer who fails to notify is deemed to have accepted title as it then is.

Colorado runs the deadline in the opposite direction, and it is the harshest of the three. Under CBS1 9.3, on or before the New ILC or New Survey Objection Deadline the buyer may terminate, or deliver a written description of the matter it requires the seller to correct. Then 9.3.3: if no written settlement is reached by the New ILC or New Survey Resolution Deadline, the contract terminates on expiration of that deadline unless the seller first receives a written withdrawal of the objection. Silence after an objection in Colorado ends the purchase rather than waiving the complaint.

Texas routes both documents through Paragraph 6D. Buyer may object in writing to matters disclosed on the survey other than the permitted exceptions at 6A(1) through (7), by the earlier of the Closing Date or a fill-in number of days after receiving the commitment, the exception documents and the survey. Seller then has a 15-day Cure Period — provided Seller is not obligated to incur any expense — after which Buyer has 5 days to terminate for a refund or waive. That expense clause is why a seller can decline to move a shed and still sit squarely inside the contract.

What gets done inside those windows is usually one of six things, unequally available: the seller removes the structure; the neighbors sign a recorded boundary line agreement fixing the line where the improvements already sit; the parties sign a recorded encroachment agreement or licence letting it stay on stated terms; a lot line adjustment is filed locally, which takes far longer than any cure period on these forms; the title company insures over it, which addresses your insurance rather than your fence; or the price moves and you buy the problem knowingly. Half of those depend on a neighbor who is not a party to your contract and has no deadline at all.

Amending the area and boundary exception: what the underwriter wants in the file

In a great many transactions the survey is in the file to buy a change to one line of Schedule B: the standard exception for discrepancies, conflicts, shortages in area or boundary lines, encroachments, protrusions and overlapping improvements. Texas makes you choose. TREC 20-19 Paragraph 6A(8) offers two boxes — the exception "will not be amended or deleted from the title policy," or it "will be amended to read 'shortages in area' at the expense of Buyer or Seller." One checkbox, and the rest of what the commitment stops insuring stays where it is.

The rule behind that box is the Texas Department of Insurance's Procedural Rule P-2, effective 11/1/2024. A company may accept an existing survey rather than require a new one when providing area and boundary coverage, if it will accept evidence of that survey plus an affidavit verifying it, notwithstanding the age of the survey or the identity of the person for whom it was prepared. On residential property the affidavit is the T-47. Then comes the condition that quietly ends some files: the policy must cover the same land described in the existing survey.

The affidavit is two pages, and paragraph 4 is where it earns its keep. Form T-47, Sec. V, effective November 1, 2024, has the affiant swear that since the date of the survey there have been no construction projects such as new structures, rooms, garages, swimming pools or deckings; no changes in the location of boundary fences or walls; no construction on immediately adjoining property near the boundary; and no conveyances, replattings or easement grants affecting the property — EXCEPT whatever goes in the blank underneath, where "None" is an answer somebody has to choose. Item 5 says the affidavit is not a warranty or guarantee of the location of improvements, and item 6 limits the affiant's liability to what they personally knew to be wrong and did not disclose.

Read 4(a) through (c) as the list of things that break the shortcut. A deck built in 2019, a fence the seller moved after a storm, a neighbor's new garage near the line: any of those turns a box (1) transaction into a new survey, and 6C already says who pays when the seller's documents are refused. The price of the amendment, unlike the price of the survey, is published. Rate Rule R-16, effective November 1, 2024 under Order 2024-8851, sets that premium at $0 on a Loan Policy, and on an Owner's Policy at 15 percent of the Basic Premium Rate where the land is not residential, or 5 percent where it is residential, but not less than $20.00.

Colorado bundles the same idea under a different name. CBS1 8.1.3 has you check whether the title commitment will or will not contain Owner's Extended Coverage, which commits the company to delete or insure over standard exceptions for parties in possession, unrecorded easements, survey matters, unrecorded mechanics' liens, the gap period and prior-year taxes, with another checkbox for who pays the extra premium. The paragraph then warns that the commitment may not provide it at all, and that the company may require a New Survey or New ILC among the requirements for it. That is the loop closing: the survey that looked optional in Section 9 is a condition of the coverage you asked for in Section 8.

Two dates to write on the survey the day it arrives

A survey is one of the few documents in a purchase whose usefulness is fixed by dates rather than content, so record both before it goes in the folder.

The first is the date the fieldwork was completed, which the Section 7 certification asks the surveyor to state separately from the date of the plat itself. That is the date a Texas affidavit, a Florida affidavit of "no change," or any underwriter's decision on the area and boundary exception gets measured against. A four-year-old drawing with a sworn statement that nothing has changed is a claim about the four years, not about the drawing.

The second is the date you received it, because that is where every objection clock here starts: five days in Florida under STANDARD B, a fill-in count in Texas running from receipt of the commitment, exception documents and survey together, and a named Objection Deadline in Colorado followed by a Resolution Deadline that can end the contract by itself. For buyer-ordered surveys Texas forecloses the argument in advance, deeming receipt to occur on the actual date or the date written in the paragraph, whichever is earlier. Put both dates alongside the other deadlines on the 45-day map, then check the survey fee against the line carrying it on your disclosure, because it is one of those fees whose recipient tells you who chose it.

Three state forms are not a national rule; these were chosen because their text is published openly enough to quote. Effective dates move independently, too — the ALTA/NSPS standards turned over on 23 February 2026, TREC's contract on 1 July 2026, Florida's form again in February 2026, Texas's P-2 and R-16 on 1 November 2024, while Ohio's rules trace to 1990. Nothing here is legal advice, and the questions that follow a real encroachment — whether a neighbor has acquired rights through long use, whether a recorded agreement or a lot line adjustment is the right instrument, what your state's limitation periods are — belong to a real estate attorney licensed where the property sits. Ask while the objection window is open, which is usually the same week the plat lands in your inbox.