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Land Surveyors Are Paying the Price of Progress
Posted by Wendell on July 20, 2018 at 4:36 am(Posted on behalf of Andy Nold)
a-harris replied 4 years, 11 months ago 20 Members · 22 Replies- 22 Replies
Thanks for sharing. Did they post an opinion from the other side, too?
The little bit I read from an earlier thread, I think one of the founders was a banking exec.
Thanks to MS board for taking action. Wonder how far this will go.
The author is complaining about the Land Surveying industry.
I enjoy being compared to a taxi company.
Good for the Board for taking action!
I think the problem here is that was not clearly addressed by the author is that there is no problem with the bank plotting in-house and making their own decision to move forward with the survey, but when the third party does the drafting accepts the liability and prepares an opinion (that they are getting paid for), then yes, this is the practice of land surveying.
If the board does not stop them a property owner will once a dispute arises and lawyers are involved especially if the owner of Vizaline (former Bank Ex.) is selling a service to his former employer. Lots of money to be had…Wonder if they offered their service across State lines?
I get that this is an opinion piece and I shouldn’t take it so personally, but I do. Reading this made me angry. Not just angry at the writer for his clear lack of information, but also at our surveying community as a whole. Something that was taught to me and something I feel very strongly about is informing the public about what we do. Surveyors do not promote themselves or our careers well. The writer of the article clearly has a line he’s drawing and it has little to do with surveying, but if he had any clue as to what a survey actually entails and that surveyors are protecting his rights and the public’s, and not just trying to protect our livelihood, then he might take his fight to a better platform.
If the owner of Vizaline does not know he’s doing wrong then that is part our fault. If he does know, and I suspect he does, then I hope the Board gets all that they have charged.
/rant
Everyone on this board – myself included – should write a polite message to the editor (whose email link is at the bottom of the story) expressing that a tech writer who knows absolutely zero about what surveyors actually do isn’t doing the public a service by jumping on a stump and opining about a nonexistent injustice. Unfortunately this kind of pseudo journalistic trash is now the norm rather than the exception.
A couple of random thoughts:
There is a distinct possibility that this particular service in Mississippi is, by definition, the practice of land surveying. There is also a “whistling past the graveyard” view that the legal definition of Land Surveying is fixed rather than malleable.
In Maryland, construction staking is defined as surveying and I know surveyors who report every incident of construction companies doing their own surveying to the board. Fine…but one day it’s inevitable that they are going to push too hard and the construction industry will push back in the legislature. And in a state that elected criminals to successive terms as governor (Spiro Agnew and Marvin Mandel) how many state delegate do they think the construction lobby owns. If (or perhaps when) real estate and banking lobby in the U.S. decided that licensing of surveyors impede their profits, licensing of surveyors will be abolished. Protecting the public be d@mned; as it is now, the insurance company has as much say in your course of medical treatment as your doctor does.
The comparison to uber and airbnb is ludicrous, but so is the belief that professional services are immune to technological disruption. Consider how many small “mom & pop” survey firms hired a CPA to do their business taxes in 1980, versus how many do it themselves with accounting software today. Law firms are hiring less entry level graduates because a lot of the entry level legal research and brief writing is being done by software. AP has software that can read a box score and write an article describing a baseball game. EdX ?? a joint project of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed software that grades college level student essays…. not multiple choice exams – essays.
Our profession has benefited greatly from technological advances; but none are one sided and none are neutral…there is always an either/or. And in a society that is becoming a, as Neil Postman coined the term, a Technopoly: “ a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” it’s as likely as not to get worse before it gets better.
Combine the deification of technology with the increasing culture revolt against institutions of authority, which many people see professions as (George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity), well to use a golf analogy…I’m glad I’m on the back nine and heading for the clubhouse.
Who is John Galt?
Using the same twisted logic found in the article it is clear that anyone with access to Web MD could be practicing medicine.
Also I never thought of having Engineers and Land Surveyors on the licensing board as being some sort of conspiracy.
Historic Boundaries and Conservation EffortsI somehow miss that this was already posted…
We sell to people who want quality information, that is an expensive service.
If I want a ride out to the airport and I don’t care about quality maybe Uber is the cheapest service out there.
If I want a first class ride with Champagne I sure am not calling Uber (showing my age…sorry I’m not using their ap).
There is a new bus service from Sacramento to L.A., $15. I’m not getting on that bus probably driven by a minimum wage driver. I posted that on the article on FB, the reaction I got was F the driver I want a cheap ride to L.A. Don’t you realize that cheap, underpaid driver, has your life in his hands? Sorry, I’d rather have a highly skilled well paid driver, you get what you pay for.
People in this country are cheapskates and they care not the least little bit about quality. They’d rather have brand new Ikea particle board furniture and cabinets that fall apart every 5 years than 60 year old solid plywood cabinets that will survive the Nuclear war.
When the banks want cheap “boundary” information they are going to get it.
Land Surveyors should focus on what we do; provide quality information to those who want to pay for it. There aren’t enough of us to survey every boundary anyway.
I paid $75 for a Property Hazards Report (required to sell Real Estate). It has all sorts of information like earthquake, flood, etc. I wonder how many professions that thing stepped on. I could see a potential boundary hazards report; if a potential problem is shown then pay for a real survey. If my property is shown to be in a flood plain I could hire a Civil Engineer and pay thousands to do a flood study and maybe find out my property is not in the flood plain but no one does that, especially on residential property.
Our society runs on the idea that there is a technological solution to every problem. Like my roof, I’m having to buy a roof, the shingles have improved considerably in the past 20 years, now they can deflect heat potentially lowering air conditioning costs. But a roofer still has to go up there and install it, they haven’t figured out a way to have some tech dweeb do that remotely from Palo Alto, at least not yet. Maybe it will become acceptable to have the Tech Dweeb paint a new roof on my house in the computer.
We have brought this on ourselves.
My first thought was that this isn’t at all like Uber et al., because those companies provide what is basically the same service as the incumbent industry. The only difference being that most of the capital expenditure and risk has been transferred from the “employer” to the “employee”.
Then I realised that although Vizaline doesn’t appear to have the inverted employee to employer relationship, they are offering a product only marginally different than our profession does. Their product isn’t much inferior to the typical mortgage location, plot plan, improvement survey, or whatever the “not a boundary survey” survey is called in your state. Frustratingly it really isn’t very inferior to many other surveys I see either.
There are miles of pipeline easement surveys out there that are only casually tied to any real boundary. There are thousands of boundary surveys that blindly place a meets and bounds description on the ground, or follow a fence line just because it’s there.
Too many of us are performing useless surveys so our clients can check a box. Too many of us are too desperate for a job to explaine to a client that the real cost to survey what they want is ten times what they want to pay, and if they don’t really need the real survey, they probably don’t need our services.
When clients are accustomed to receiving a product with little professional value, of course they will jump to a service that provides almost the same thing for a fraction of the price. Even if Vizaline loses this case, the economic pressure is so great I am sure laws will be changed to allow services like this. It will cost the jobs of some land surveyors, but most of those will be the ones providing sub professional services. Maybe in the long run, this will increase our value in the eyes of the public.
I don’t know much about Mississippi but in Colorado the level of information this Vizaline outfit is providing is already publicly available on nearly every County Assessor website in the form of GIS or Tax Map overlays. No one relies on them for land transactions because they disclaim the hell out of them and there’s no one to sue for inaccuracies because of governmental immunity. Whether it’s the Mississippi Board or Inevitability, Vizaline had a limited shelf life from inception.
Everything that article represents is why I politely decline every residential lot survey call I get.
I sent the writer my $0.02.
What the writer (^&$#as$) of that article doesn’t get is that many deeds (or the math therein) doesn’t perfectly describe many boundary lines. There is much, much more to locating a boundary than drawing the math on a computer and measuring it out on the ground. As far as a bank or new landowner is concerned they can transfer title with the original description (good, bad or ugly) around my parts, they do it all the time and without surveys. If they want to really know where their boundaries are (and have proper math) there is a lot more involved and requires knowledge and skills not much related to math, trig and operating some measuring devices.
Yeah, once all the corner proper coordinates are entered in the “we want it in the free cloud” it will be simple. Getting there not so easy, costly and going to require some very professional services. If you want it right it is going to cost you plenty.
In case anyone missed it the ars piece linked at the bottom is way better, with links to some of the case documents and players.
I do not see any rulings listed however just the initial summons and a motion to file, maybe someone here can find and follow the case documents. I assume they need to be printed out in person at the Chancery County Court in Madison Mississippi, too bad the Institute for Justice guys are not hosting the PDFs on their website along with their narrative and commentary .
Does this fall into the “It’s a gig economy” category ? ????
I was stopped at the post office by a realtor. His company is only interested in rural property, ranches and small “hobby farm” type properties. They tend to use on-line data to map out ranches for presentations. He couldn’t understand why the on-line data varied so greatly from record info.
I was getting very frustrated with the conversation, I related some of the problems and issues the on-line data has caused. In one case jail time was a possibility until the landowner trespassed on relented.
He tapped on his phone a bit and showed me a local property that I have some knowledge about, the polygon on the parcel map shows 89 acres while the deed claims 74 acres. I looked at the phone map and tried to point out some easy to see issues like the east line was shown 200+ feet east of the fence line. Along the west line is another large fence line/polygon line problem. Of course I don’t have the deed or anything to look at but even after showing him these issues, he still couldn’t understand that the on-line polygon is junk. I must of said a dozen times that it’s always junk, don’t ever trust it. I don’t think it worked. The public sees something drawn out on the computer and it is gospel to them, even people who should know better.
“The board??s action, says the complaint, ??will silence Vizaline??s constitutionally protected speech.?
Interesting defense I’ve not seen before. Usually these folks’ defense is “We’re not surveying.” From another article: “Similarly, David Snyder, the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said that the case will likely turn on the question of whether Vizaline is or is not engaged in surveying under current state law.”
Looks like the Board is backing off; from the Feb. 2019 Board Opinion referenced below:
“The following items are not to be considered as activities within the definition of the practice of land surveying: [ . . . ]
9. Work products containing the following written disclaimer in at least twelve point font:
??This work product represents only generalized locations of features,
objects or boundaries and should not be relied upon as being legally
authoritative for the precise location of any feature, object or
boundary.?Declaratory Opinion – The Practice of Land Surveying
From Vizaline’s Third Party Motion:
“52. Vizaline does not market its services as a survey or as a substitute for surveys.
53. Vizaline alerts its customers that ??Vizaline??s product Viza-plat is a polygon(s) of a
particular property of interest, constructed from a property description and placed on imagery for
visualization and general reference purposes only.?
54. Vizaline further alerts its customers that ??It is not a Legal Survey, nor is it intended to be
or replace a Legal Survey.?Visaline could get off the hook by quoting the Board’s disclaimer in writing verbatim on their work product instead of their present rather mushy disclaimer. The Board may have shot Land Surveyors in the foot; can anybody in Mississippi with a GIS, GPS or drone, etc. now “locate” stockpiles, infrastructure, even boundaries and sell a “map”, as long as the disclaimer is in place?
I also note their website states that as of February 2016 they have over twenty banks in AL, LA,MS and TN. [ . . . ] We do not market to law firms but have some that have heard about the product and have joined the program also. What actions are being taken by the Boards in Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee concerning Visaline?
I don’t get it. Basically these people are trying to sell to people who are too dumb to operate google earth? Because any mouthbreather can go on there and look for fence lines, tree lines, or mow lines– which I’m sure is exactly where this start-up is plopping their “calculated boundary”.
Anyway, I’m not worried at all; one nice encroachmant lawsuit will send these clowns packing.
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