Real estate exam terms
8 terms, each with a plain definition, the term it is most often confused with, and how the license exam actually asks about it.
43,560 square feet
The standard unit of land area in the United States. There is no standard shape — an acre is an area, so it can be any set of dimensions whose product is 43,560 square feet.
Pearson VUE’s candidate handbook states plainly that 43,560 square feet per acre and 5,280 feet per mile are not supplied at the test centre and should be memorised. Every area question depends on the first of them.
A description by lot number within a block on a recorded subdivision plat
Also called the recorded plat system. Once a subdivision map is recorded, each parcel can be described in a line — Lot 14, Block 3 — with the recorded plat supplying the dimensions. It is the shortest and clearest system, and it only works where a plat exists.
The word "recorded" is doing the work: without the recorded plat the description means nothing.
A description tracing a boundary by directions and distances from a point of beginning
The oldest system in use in the United States, standard in the original thirteen states and anywhere land was never laid out on a grid. It reads as a walk around the perimeter, and it must close — return to the point of beginning — or it describes no enclosed parcel at all.
The failure mode the exam tests is a description that does not return to the point of beginning.
A fixed marker — natural or placed — used as a reference point in a description
An iron pin, a stone, a large tree, the centre line of a road. Metes and bounds descriptions lean on monuments, and where a call to a monument conflicts with a stated distance, the monument generally controls, because it is the thing that was actually there.
The priority rule — monuments over courses and distances — is the examinable point.
A recorded map dividing land into lots, blocks, streets and easements
A subdivider files a plat map with the local recorder, and from that moment every parcel on it can be described by lot and block. The plat also dedicates the streets and utility easements shown on it to public use.
The recording is the operative act. A drawing that has not been recorded is not a plat for the purposes of a legal description.
The north–south reference line for a rectangular survey area
Each surveyed region is measured from one principal meridian running north and south and one base line running east and west. Townships are counted north or south of the base line, ranges east or west of the meridian.
Meridian for ranges, base line for townships. Reversing the pair is the standard error in rectangular survey items.
The government grid of townships, ranges and sections used across most of the country
Also called the government survey or the Public Land Survey System. Land is located from principal meridians and base lines into six-mile-square townships, each divided into 36 sections of one square mile — 640 acres each.
Two numbers carry most items: a section is 640 acres, and a township contains 36 sections. Read a quarter description from right to left, dividing by four at each step.
One square mile of land: 640 acres
The working unit of the rectangular survey system. Thirty-six sections make a township, and sections are subdivided into halves and quarters — a quarter section is 160 acres, a quarter of a quarter is 40.
Compute a quarter description by multiplying the denominators and dividing 640 by the result: the NE¼ of the SW¼ is 640 ÷ 16 = 40 acres.
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