Metes and Bounds Descriptions in California

How the description is built

Every metes and bounds description starts at a point of beginning, which is tied to something identifiable: a section corner, a recorded monument, a street intersection.

From there it recites a series of calls. Each call has a bearing, the direction expressed as an angle from north or south, and a distance. Thence north 42 degrees 15 minutes east, 180.00 feet. Each call ends where the next begins, and the last one must return to the point of beginning.

The metes are the measurements. The bounds are the physical or recorded features the line runs to or along: a creek, a road, a wall, an adjoining parcel. A description can use both, and the ones that cause trouble usually do.

Why two descriptions of the same land can disagree

Bearings and distances are recorded at a moment, with the instruments of that moment, by a person who may have made an error. Monuments move, decay or get removed. Roads are realigned. A creek called as a boundary shifts course over a century.

So the paper and the ground drift apart, and a modern survey working from the same description can put the line somewhere the previous survey did not.

California courts resolve those conflicts with an order of priority developed for exactly this problem. Natural monuments generally control over artificial monuments, artificial monuments over courses and distances, and courses and distances over stated area. The reasoning is that the things hardest to fake or mistake are the most reliable evidence of what the parties meant.

That hierarchy is why a call to a creek can beat a stated distance, and why the acreage figure at the end of a description is the weakest thing in it.

What to do when your description does not close

A description closes when the calls return to the point of beginning. Many old ones do not, leaving a gap or an overlap, and the discrepancy is where a dispute lives.

A licensed surveyor can identify the failure and, from the surrounding record, usually work out what was intended. That opinion is evidence, not a determination, and where the adjoining owner's surveyor reaches a different conclusion the question becomes a legal one.

Where two recorded descriptions genuinely conflict, the resolution is a quiet title or boundary determination action rather than a negotiation, because only a judgment binds the record and future owners.

Metes and bounds against the alternatives

Most California suburban property is described by reference to a recorded subdivision map: lot 14 of tract 3821. That description is short, precise and easy to locate, because the map does the work.

Rural, older and irregular parcels are still described by metes and bounds, and so are easements, which is why easement disputes so often turn into descriptive ones.

There is also the public land survey system, describing land by township, range and section. It appears in California in rural areas and in the calls that fix a point of beginning.

If your deed uses metes and bounds and the adjoining parcel uses a subdivision map, that mismatch alone is worth a survey before anyone builds a fence.

What we need to look at one

The deed with the full legal description, not the summary on the first page. Any prior deed in the chain, because descriptions get retyped and errors get introduced. Any recorded map referenced in the calls. Any survey ever done on either parcel.

An action to determine the boundary is filed where the property sits under Code of Civil Procedure section 392, which is also where every one of those documents is recorded.

This article is general information about California law and is not legal advice for any specific situation. If you are dealing with this issue, the facts of your matter will change the analysis.