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Legal description and survey do not match, wife and I in a panic.

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ShaunKL

Junior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Louisiana

Tl/dr Legal description on deed does not match what surveyor came out with. No problems at all, even when selling a piece of the property, until now that we're trying to close on a mortgage deal.

It's a bit of a long story, but my Wife and I are trying to get a mortgage loan and are having issues with the deed and survey not matching up, we are starting to panic, any advice would be great!

So, on April 15th 2015 my wife and I purchased land. The description on the property deed and what the seller described to me didn't match up(the deed described less land than what the seller claimed they were selling to me) so naturally I had a survey done.

I provided the surveyor with the legal description*** of the property and the result of the survey. Now the survey matches up with what the seller claimed they were selling to me, and the surveyor told me that legal descriptions are rarely 100% accurate, which is also what I had read online. So, I thought everything was good to go considering the survey was supposedly based directly on the deed I provided(why wouldn't it be?) and went ahead and purchased the land.

A few months go by and we decided that we wanted to subdivide the land and sell off a piece. We contacted the surveyor and had him go out and subdivide the land. After not much time at all we received an offer on the land. We provided the survey and the deed to the buyer and they had their lawyer do what lawyers do in this type of sell and researched the property. Apparently no issue was found with the deed not matching the survey exactly so the sell went through without a hitch. Their lawyer wrote up a new legal description for the piece we sold off(the 0.77 acre lot) and we signed papers and closed on the deal; everything was fine.

Fast forward to this year, and we are trying to get a mortgage loan for a manufactured home to be moved onto the property. Everything was going fine until the title company was setting up the closing of the deal. Their attorney contacted us and is now saying that the deed does not match up with the survey legally and that it will cause issues. He said according to the legal(that I linked above) it says a frontage of 194 feet but that I'm claiming much more, by which I also sold a part of. He said one way to clear it up would be to have the surveyor go back out there and have him re-survey the land but based literally off of the legal description.

I asked if that meant we actually purchased far less land than what we originally thought, and he said to him legally yes, that's what it meant. So this has me in a straight panic, because if this is the case, what happens to the people we sold the land to, and would we owe them money for the land that we "sold" them that turns out may not have even been ours?

Who would be responsible for such a huge **** up if this turns out to be the case? And which can be assumed more accurate, the literal description on the deed or the survey that was done based off the surveyor's research of the deed?
 
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