How to Survey a House

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm John Jackson from Remax Suburban in St. Louis, Missouri. I'm here today to talk about how to buy a house for Expert Village. With the property under contract, the lender now requires us to do a survey of the property. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about that and how that process works. The survey is an overhead drawing, a sketch, made by the land surveying company. They actually draw out the property as it sits within the boundary lines and all the improvements on the property. It will show decks and porches and make sure that everything is built within the regulations for that local municipality. I'm standing next to a sewer discharge. This is actually water rain retention discharge so the survey may in fact show that the sewer company maintains the right to have access to this small area. The survey will show any encroachments from your property onto a neighbor's property as well as any neighbor's property onto your property that may affect the value down the road. For example, very often in my market, garages are added after the home was built. Building requirements change constantly so it is entirely possible that a garage that was built fifty or sixty years ago may in fact sit over a property line, even by just a small number of inches and if that's the case and your neighbor then decides they'd like your garage removed from their property, that obviously affects the value of the home. And that's one example I can use to demonstrate the importance of having a survey performed on the property that you're purchasing."