Every closing file answers a different question about the same home. The appraisal answers what it is worth, the inspection answers what shape the house is in, and the title search answers who owns it and what claims ride on it. None of them answers where it is — where the land actually begins and ends, and whether everything sitting on it sits inside its own lines. That is the survey's job, and this page is what a survey is, what it shows, and when a purchase actually needs one.
A survey is made by a licensed land surveyor, and licensing is the point: the surveyor is professionally responsible for the measurements, signs and seals the plat, and can be called on it later. The work starts from the paper — the legal description in the deed, the subdivision plat, prior surveys and the recorded easements — and finishes in the field, finding or re-setting the corner markers and measuring the improvements against the lines. The deliverable is the plat or map plus a written report: a drawing of the parcel as it physically is, not as the listing described it.
Boundaries and corners first. Then the improvements plotted against them — house, additions, garage, fences, driveway, pool — because a structure's position relative to the line is a legal fact, not a visual impression. Then the easements and rights of way that touch the parcel, and any encroachment in either direction: yours onto the neighbor's land, or theirs onto yours. A standard survey also flags where fences depart from the lines they are assumed to follow, which on older lots is more common than not.
The standard title commitment carries a survey exception: the policy will not cover matters a correct survey would have shown — boundary disputes, encroachments, unrecorded easements in use. That exception exists because a records search cannot locate anything in the physical world. A current survey is the evidence that lets the title company delete or narrow that exception, which is why surveys and title commitments arrive in the same conversation even though different professionals produce them.
A buyer is rarely ordered by law to buy a new survey. The practical triggers are the lender, which commonly requires a current survey before funding, and the title company, which wants one before it will insure over the survey exception. Between the triggers sits the common middle route: the seller's existing survey, handed over with the seller's affidavit that no improvements or boundary changes have happened since it was made, is accepted by many lenders and title companies. What decides it is age and change — a recent survey on an untouched lot answers everything a new one would; a twenty-year-old survey on a lot that has gained a fence, a shed and an addition answers very little.
A survey fixes lines; it does not grade the house, value it, or guarantee the title. It will not find a failing septic system, price the home, or insure you against a defect in the chain of ownership — those are the inspection, the appraisal and the title policy, and the guides on this site cover each of them. Its value is narrower and very real: after a survey, the parcel you are buying is a measured thing with corners in the ground, and every later dispute about a fence, a driveway or an addition starts from a document instead of a memory.
Homeowner HQ is the homeowner's side of the record long before a survey is ordered: your own agent's monthly home-value updates keep your picture of your home current, and the fix-my-facts route keeps the facts behind that picture — lot, improvements, additions — corrected while there is no deadline attached. When a contract does come, your agent reads the survey with the title commitment beside it: which lines are verified, which exception the survey lets the title company narrow, and which surprise needs an answer inside the contract's deadlines.
A property survey is a licensed land surveyor's measurement and mapping of a parcel: where its boundaries actually run, where its corners are, and how the things on and around it — the house, fences, driveways, easements and any encroachment from a neighbor — sit against those lines. The surveyor works from the legal description in the deed, the recorded plats and prior surveys, and markers found or set in the ground, and delivers a signed survey plat or map together with a written report. It answers the land questions a sale turns on that no other closing document answers: a title search works from records and cannot locate a fence; an appraisal values the property and assumes its boundaries; an inspection examines the house. A current survey is what lets a title company delete or narrow the standard survey exception in the title commitment — the exception that excludes boundary and encroachment matters the records alone cannot settle.
Four things, in order. The boundary lines and corner markers, found or re-set, so the parcel on paper is the parcel on the ground. The improvements in relation to those lines — the house, additions, fences, driveways, pools and sheds — including any that cross a line or a setback. The easements and rights of way that touch the land, plotted where the records place them, and any visible use by others — a path, a shared drive, utility lines — that the records may not fully describe. And any encroachment in either direction: the neighbor's structure or fence on this land, or this property's structures on the neighbor's. Anything that surprises you on that list is a question for the seller, the title company or your attorney before closing, inside the contract's title and survey deadlines — a survey found a problem is a problem that can still be priced, cured or walked away from.
Usually not by law — no general rule makes a buyer commission a new survey on an ordinary home purchase. In practice it is required whenever someone else's money or coverage depends on it: many lenders require a current survey (or accept a recent existing one) before funding, a title company commonly requires one to remove the survey exception from its commitment, and some contracts and some states' standard forms build a survey into the deal with a deadline and a cost assigned to a named party. An existing survey from the seller, with the seller's affidavit that nothing has changed since it was made, is often accepted in place of a new one. Cash buyers are free to skip it — and take the boundary risk themselves, which is why the honest default is: if no current survey exists and the lot's lines have never been verified in your ownership, the survey is the cheapest certainty in the whole closing file.
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