I knew exactly where the property line was because I had paid a licensed surveyor to mark it when I bought the house in 2019. When my neighbor put up the six-foot privacy fence in April, I could see immediately that it wasn’t on the line, so I hired the same surveyor again and had him reset the pins and prepare a new stamped drawing. He charged me four hundred dollars, walked the boundary with me, and showed me exactly where the fence needed to be. That same weekend, my neighbor moved two of the pins several feet toward my driveway, and my camera caught him doing it. I brought the survey, the photographs, and the video to the May board meeting, expecting the board to simply require him to correct the fence, but they took the matter under advisement and never contacted me again.
In September I requested the complete architectural application because I wanted to see exactly what the committee had approved. The application included a hand-drawn site plan showing the fence directly on the property line, even though the survey I’d commissioned showed it sitting four feet inside my property. I asked the committee chair who had prepared the drawing, and he said it had been submitted by the homeowner and reviewed by the committee. Then I looked at the signature at the bottom. The property owner had signed it, but so had the person who prepared the site plan, and the preparer’s name was the same surveyor I had hired. I called his office and asked whether he had prepared a second survey for my neighbor, and the receptionist initially said there was no record of one. Then she found an invoice from March for a boundary survey at my neighbor’s address.
I asked for a copy of that survey, and what they sent me was not a survey at all. It was the same drawing I’d been given in April, except the property line had been moved several feet and the original survey pins weren’t shown anywhere on it. My lawyer compared the two documents and found that the measurements along the back boundary were identical, but the starting point had been shifted, which made the fence appear legal on paper. Then she pulled the surveyor’s licensing records and found that he had certified both drawings. The strangest part wasn’t that he’d prepared a different survey for my neighbor — it was that the second survey had been completed three weeks before I paid him to “rediscover” the exact same boundary, and the person who ordered it was the architectural committee chair.
