Reasons You Need A New Land Survey:
There are a number of things a homebuyer needs to provide during the purchase a home, such as an inspection and appraisal. One of the most important is a property survey. Most homebuyers see no harm in recycling the previous homeowners’ survey and a new practice has property owners signing a “survey affidavit” as a substitute for a new survey. This is unwise for quite a few reasons:

Primarily, the old survey is certified only for the (current) seller, not the (new) buyer. In recycling the old survey, the current homeowner and new buyer are attesting that nothing on the property has changed since the date of the survey. This puts everyone in an awkward position, as the new buyer has no way of determining if the old survey was correct, much less a way to identify any changes or if there was an error. Nor do the sellers know what information is crucial and to what standards a survey must be conducted to be correct. The seller might also be put into a position of covering up or not disclosing any issues in order to avoid obtaining a current survey due to time restraints. 

A new survey will identify the current location of new structures, fences, walls, and additions to the property, as well as any recent, missing, destroyed or erroneous property corners. Other things addressed on a survey are encroachments onto and off of the property and access to and from a public right-of-way.

In all instances, buyers of real property should always have a new survey conducted. Those buyers who do not have a new land survey will be purchasing property without reliable information as to encroachments, overlaps, boundary line disputes and other matters that might be disclosed by an accurate survey of the property by a registered professional land surveyor.