Legal description for real estate is a string of information that describes and defines the property being bought or sold. The information in the description must be complete enough for a licensed surveyor or real estate expert to easily figure out the boundary lines.
Legal Description Significance in Real Estate
The description helps to determine the shape, size, boundaries, and geographical location of a portion of land. The description explicitly states the county and state of location of the property. Moreover, legal description remains the legal evidence of boundary that is unique to a piece of land; this written document must be issued during real estate transactions, should a conflict arise.
Investors’ Knowledge of Legal Description
The information in some legal descriptions requires the services of real estate experts to interpret. The description remains more convincing than the address and size of landed properties, but the surprising part is that many real estate investors cannot decode it. Therefore, they prefer to copy and paste it from one document to another. During the process, incorrect information might go from one document to another!
Elements of Legal Description
There are different methods of creating a legal description, including metes and bounds, lot and block, and rectangular survey methods. The rectangular survey method remains the most commonly used method. In this method, a piece of land that is 24 miles square splits into townships that are 6 miles square. These areas split into 36 tracts of 1-mile square sections. Each has a name according to its relative position to the four cardinal points that intersect at the center of the main square.
