Is It True That Surveys Are Done Per Plot?
- Posted by Karo Itoje in Blog Updates, Land Tips and Advice
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Someone asked this question:
Is it true that surveys are done per plot and not the size of the total parcel of land that i bought.
For Instance if i buy a acre of land, I will have to do survey for each plots in the acre
Officially by default, surveys are done per plot and therefore the fees charged by plot. Whether there is a law regarding this, is something I am not sure of. However it does make sense to do survey per plot.
First it’s unfair to expect the surveyors to survey several plots and charge the same amount. It means someone will have 10 acres and survey it for the same amount. That’s just not reasonable. Also knowing the kind of government that we have, they won’t be making money either, and you and I know our government likes to make money!
Read: Cost of Land Survey Plan in Lagos Nigeria
Aside that though, surveying per plot has a big benefit for you too.
Usually someone buying more than a plot does so for investment purpose which includes selling in the future for profit. Now if your survey is done by plot, in the future when you want to sell you just show the survey for that plot to the prospective buyer and proceed with negotiations. However if everything is done in one document, if you want to sell per plot in the future, you will first have to do another survey from the acre or more plots that you have, paying the new survey price in the future, if it has changed, to document the measurement of the plot you are selling before you can sell. As you know a Survey plan is a document that measures the boundary of a parcel of land to give an accurate measurement and description of that land. You can’t sell a piece of land to someone without officially documenting the measurement you’re selling to them through a legit survey plan.
What if you don’t hope to sell in the future isn’t it a waste of money to do the survey per plot? No, it’s not. And I’ll explain.
Say you build on the plots and have tenants occupy the building. When you have passed and the property is inherited by your children/relatives and someday they want to sell one of the buildings, again they will need the survey.
So in a nutshell when an acre of land is surveyed as a whole it can only be treated officially as a whole except another survey is done to survey a part from it. So when a survey is done by plot it means you can treat each plot separately.
Does this mean you can not make one survey for several plots of land?
No, it does not. I’m that if you want to you can have a surveyor survey your whole piece of land as one and create one document for it. However most real estate companies don’t support this. And the ones that do you will pay more than the amount of survey for one plot but much less than you will pay if you were to survey land per plot.
