One of the decisions you will have to make as a home buyer is whether or not you want to pay for a survey to be drawn of the boundary lines of the land you are purchasing. When we are acting as the closing attorneys on a purchase transaction, we strongly suggest to our buyers that they have a survey drawn. The reasons for this are many.
Having an accurate, up-to-date survey will give you specific knowledge of whether or not there are any current boundary line disputes associated with the property. For example, the home you are under contract to purchase shares a hedge row with an adjacent neighbor. Your spouse loves the hedge row and it is one of the reasons that you have decided to buy the home. You tell the closing attorney, “we do not need a survey, there is no fence and our agent has not told us of any current problems.” You ultimately end up purchasing the home. Two years later, your neighbor sells his home to Buyer X who does not like the hedge row at all and he wants to put a fence up between your lots and in order to do so he wants to dig up the hedges. You of course are adamant that you will allow no such thing. A week goes by and your neighbor confidently strolls up to your door with a paper in his hand. He then thrusts the paper in your face showing a current survey of the property that he had drawn and come to find out, the hedge row sits entirely ON HIS PROPERTY!
Therefore, he can and does have every right to remove the hedges. He does exactly that and puts up and eight foot privacy fence between the lots. Now you have a very unhappy spouse. There are thousands of examples like this one that could have been avoided if the buyer would have purchased a survey. The moral of the story: if you spend the four to five hundred dollars to have a survey drawn, you can avoid a great many problems.