A licensed and insured land surveyor can assist with locating property lines. General dimensions for a property are found on a property's site plan or survey documents.
How can I determine my property line? Your deed will have a legal description of the boundary of your property, but you need a surveyor to use this information to locate the property lines and place markers on the land.
Hire a licensed land surveyor The most accurate way to know where your land begins and ends is to hire a surveyor to determine your property lines. The property surveyor will first check county records to understand the history of the lot.
Here are the most common ways to find them: Check Google Maps. This one is the quickest and easiest way to establish where your property lines are. Hire a surveyor. Check online property records. Look for physical markers on your property. Check your property deed. Check a plat map. Review your property survey.
Building a fence directly on a property line requires mutual agreement with the neighboring property owner. Without consent, you may have to adjust the placement, which could lead to legal disputes.
Under the law of adverse possession in Pennsylvania, when someone possesses and uses land that they do not own, in the required manner and amount of time (10 years for single-family lots smaller than a half-acre and 21 years for all others), they may be able to gain ownership of that land.
Fences between 30 inches and 6 feet tall are administratively reviewed by the Planning Department. If the fence exceeds 6 feet in height, a building permit is also needed from Centre Region Code. To assist applicants with building code requirements, the Code Agency has fence guidelines available on their website.
An encroachment is a situation where a building, structure, or something else goes beyond the boundary of the owner's land onto a neighbor's property. It is a form of trespass. An exploration of adverse possession and prescriptive easements is outside the scope of this guide.
Under the doctrine of consentable lines, a party must establish that each party has claimed the land on their side of the line as their own and that the occupation has occurred for the statutory period of 21 years. Quoting the Supreme Court in Zeglin v. Gahagen, 812 A. 2d 558 (Pa.