What is a Survey Plan and Why Is it Important for a Real Estate Deal?

Video transcription

A survey plan is probably the single most powerful document that you can acquire to attach to your deal using your deal that protects you and your client and your deal. First and foremost, it’s a legal document. It is a written contract with various components to it. The second thing is it is a diagrammatic representation of land boundaries, physical features and structures. So it's both a legal documents that counters legal weight, but it's also a diagrammatic representation.

In the olden days before Survey plans we used to do metes and bounds descriptions, which were paragraphs, pages long sometimes description and old medieval English of where to start and How to project that boundary line out, now we use Survey Plans

A Survey Plan represents the legal opinion of the Ontario Land Surveyor who developed it, who produced it. Now, every survey plan in Ontario has to be produced by an Ontario Land Surveyor and OLS, and Ontario Land Surveyors and land survey firms operate under the guise and under the coordination of the Association of Ontario Land Surveyors.

It's a very strong organization, professional organization that maintains the standards and maintains the excellence that the surveyors in Ontario produce and the rules that they have to adhere to.

Does that mean two different surveys can have two different opinions on when a boundary where boundary is? The answer is yes, they can. Technically, they can have discrepancies. Surveyors absolutely detest when there's a disagreement over where a boundary is between surveys. And the reason it sometimes happens, is because it is like ancestry.com, with an investigation that goes back in time. The heritage of these boundaries, or the further back you can go, the more certainty you have as a Surveyor as you thread that history forward and that the opinion you are creating today, of where the boundary is, is accurate and can withstand the rigor of historical investigation.