No problem. I'll just move those...

Being in real estate has its hilarities and horrors. I wonder if this is especially true with rural real estate. I have no big city real estate to which to compare.

I live in an area where people have very little money -- low income, no cash, no savings, bad credit and a strong desire to own their own little piece of planet earth.

While I cannot say this is true of everyone where I live, many of the people are not super savvy about consumer issues, especially real estate.

I was sitting in a continuing education class today (required yearly to keep my license) listening to the instructor talk about surveys, survey marks and other related topics. Most of what he talked about I already knew and my mind wandered to a situation I had about a year ago.

My mom (who was at the time also my broker) and I had created a miracle to put a buyer and seller together, but in the process there was a misunderstanding about a structure on the property and whether it stayed or was to be dismantled and carted away with the owner. In all the brouhaha, the buyer became increasingly agitated when she began to see things were not going the way she wanted them to.

Meanwhile, the surveyor had gone out to the property to survey approximately an acre and a half off to be sold from the three total acres that was held by the seller. The survey was drawn. The stakes were in the ground, we were just moments from the closing and the seller rushes through our front door all afluster because of something the buyer was doing on the land.

Apparently, the buyer didn't like the results of her survey. The property was a corner lot in a subdivision. When the roads were cut through the subdivision and dedicated to the county, part of the land for the road was taken from the property being sold. It showed on the survey that 20 or 25 feet of land along one side of the property was held as county right of way.

The buyer considered this her land and didn't like that the stakes were on the other side of the road because that part of her land was "unusable" (being that it was road and all). So... no problem, she just moved that set of stakes 25 feet to the other side of the road and then moved the stakes on the other side of the property out a matching 25 feet onto the neighboring land and considered the matter settled.

Oh if it only worked that way. I have a nice little lot at the back of my yard that I would love to own. I could do a stealth mission in the middle of the night and move my back markers. For that matter, maybe I should move my markers all the way down to the southern Louisiana border. That way I could say I have oceanfront property.

Or in the famous words of Mister Rogers, "Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won't you be my neighbor?" By tomorrow you might be!