This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 1:15 am and is filed under Laws, Contracts + Records, Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 7, 2007
In the second part of the class our teacher moved on to legal descriptions and their meanings.
In Utah, when you receive your property tax notification at the end of the year, it has some weird numbers. These specifies the page and book of information pertaining to your property. Fences lead to many disputes, this is because when you build the fence, you frequently build based on the telephone marker, or the grass division. In Utah there is case law on fences, it’s necessary that both owners agree to fence line becoming the recognized property line. If they don’t, and the fence was built wrong, you may find yourself having to move it.
There is an exception, a fence must be in place 20+ years and must be recognized as the division line between the two parties for this time. After the passage of such a period of time, it can be petitioned that the property line be recognized as the fence line.
County records and property lines apply to many real estate transactions. For example locally, the State road commission controls some of the larger roads, and restricts the access given to businesses. This means that even if you own a business bordering one such street, you cannot legally have a driveway feeding into or from the road. The prime reason behind this is the state doesn’t want people driving onto the road, particularly ones with 50 mph speed limits.
In Utah in order to maintain the right to control a road privately, one must chain the road for at least one day a year. Many universities do so on Christmas as a means of limiting the inconvenience caused to students by complying with said requirement.
Interestingly, the state puts fences one foot INSIDE their land along the freeway when bordering private property.
Much of Utah has been divided based on a square system composed of 36 square mile blocks called townships, all numbered based on their distance from the SE corner of temple square in Salt Lake.
Each town square is numbered from the top right something we were reminded would be on the test. Town squares are then separated into increasingly smaller squares using some peculiar forms of measurement:
Links: 7.92 inches
Rods: 16 1/2 feet
Chains: 1660 feet
Class closed up with the teacher telling us that computers had greatly simplified the act of handling land records. Metes and bounds, using degrees were once done by hand with primitive compasses.
His closing words of advice to us were to write everything down, and read everything that’s written in real estate transactions, and finally, we were reminded that it would be our job to catch and fix the errors committed by title companies. He ended class, and proceeded to go to work cleaning that board.
I waited until the class had cleared, and asked for a handout. He kindly handed me one…guess I haven’t been discovered yet!
read comments (2)
March 7th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Glad to hear you can keep giving us info. :o) I always thought it was odd to measure things in “rods.” What’s the point?
March 7th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
My guess is it’s just a dated process that the state deems too cemented to update.