Boundary Survey in Seattle, WA

Most Washington Homes Change Hands Without One

A residential sale in King County usually closes with no survey at all. The standard owner's title policy handles that by excepting anything an accurate survey would have revealed - encroachments, overlaps, a fence off the line, a shed on the neighbor's side. So the buyer is insured on paper and uninsured on exactly the question most people assume was answered at closing. A boundary survey is how an owner closes that gap by choice: before building near a line, before replacing a fence, before a disagreement hardens, or simply because the county map on the screen was never meant to settle it.

The Parcel Viewer Is Not the Deed

The ten-digit King County parcel number and the lines drawn on iMap or the assessor's maps exist for taxation and reference. They are compiled from recorded documents, often shifted by several feet, and they carry no legal weight. The controlling description is in the deed, and behind it the recorded plat. In Seattle those plats are old and do not always agree with each other - downtown is where the Denny, Boren and Maynard plats meet at mismatched angles, and neighborhoods further out were platted piecemeal by different hands in different decades. The research stage reconciles those records before anyone sets up an instrument.

Finding Monuments Under a Century of Garden

Original iron pipes and brass-capped street monuments are frequently still there, just buried under decades of topsoil, rockery, laurel hedge or blackberry. Tall conifer canopy across much of Shoreline, Kirkland and Mercer Island weakens satellite positioning, so a lot of the measurement is done by traverse with a total station, running from street control into the yard. Wet-season digging for a buried pin is slow, careful work, and it is often the difference between confirming an old corner and having to reestablish one.

The Public Record That Follows

Washington's Survey Recording Act, RCW 58.09, generally requires the surveyor to file a record of survey with the county when corners are set that did not previously exist, when a corner materially departs from the record description, or when an ambiguity could reasonably produce more than one line. That filing becomes part of the public record the next surveyor will start from. The survey locates the line and the improvements against it; it does not decide who owns a disputed strip - that is a question for an attorney, and the drawing is the evidence they will need. If you are thinking about moving the line itself, that is a lot boundary adjustment; if you are dividing the lot, it becomes a short plat. For a commercial transaction, lenders ask for an ALTA/NSPS survey instead. Owners in Bellevue and Renton order this work for the same reasons Seattle owners do.

How long does it take? Field work is often one or two visits, stretched by dense vegetation and wet-season ground. Research into the plat and prior records of survey sets the rest of the timeline.

Frequently Asked Questions