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Fortunately, his task was to place 4" of topsoil or decorative rock, so, many of the monuments missing due to his/her activities are simply buried.īy the start of last season we had our ads in the newspaper, in most of the phone books, and appearing on all the Internet maps and directories, all to little avail.
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However, what put the 2005/2006 subdivisions nearly on par with the 1960/80’s subdivisions was the initial landscaper. The lost value, replacement expense and resulting litigation expense over the years will probably be greater than the cost of the sewer infrastructure itself.Īdditionally, many subdivisions everywhere have had their gas lines replaced, and in the process knocked out many of the back lot corners. The resulting property limbo is typical for many old cities, big or small each limbo being a product of engineering and government ineptitude. From a surveyor’s viewpoint, Lake Havasu passed from a "new city" to an "old city" almost overnight. Beginning in 2004 the city installed sewer mains down the middle of the streets and knocked out all the centerline monuments and half of the front corners. A modern town with excellent survey control where 90% of the monuments were in and all were in precise agreement. When we first started surveying in Lake Havasu in 2002 the experience was wonderful. What happened to all the monuments? For a lark we sniffed around some built-up 20 subdivisions and found nearly the same percentages except that all the centerline monuments were still in.įor an explanation we hearkened back to our time in Lake Havasu City, AZ, a city founded in 1963, where we witnessed monument degradation on a massive scale.
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Not much different from the rest of American, but these are subdivisions from the 1960’s1980’s for crying out loud. We found that 90% of the lots in these retirement communities were missing at least one lot corner monument and 30% were missing all of them (missing = not visible). We started in Green Valley with a couple of surveys for relatives and neighbors. There will be little appreciation and loyalty from this crowd. This did give us exposure and some projects did trickle in, but what we really learned is that most Real Estate Agents have a cavalier attitude toward property corner monuments, surveyors and fiduciary responsibilities in general. We tried seminars for Real Estate Agents and newsletter follow-ups. From the latter we learned this, "don’t ever discount your work, the good clients think less of you and the others expect the low rates forever." One client xeroxed the coupons, passed them around and three years later we are still running into them. In Green Valley we racked our brains for ideas and approaches including newspaper ads with introductory coupons. However, first building a loyal and appreciative client base is tough. Thus it is difficult for large firms with three crews per PLS to do anything but wham bam boundary surveys and the only things that such surveys accomplish are confusion and more corrective surveys for us. For example, the research files for each of our last four projects in Idaho are three inches thick and each took four days to gather and analyze, whereas the field work for each was only two days. Of necessity, most good land boundary surveyors are in solo, family operated firms. Arizona after 2007 is really tough.Ĭontrary to what we recently read on LinkedIn, "Personally, I believe the days of the small surveying practice are now over," for Land Boundary Surveyors we believe the opposite is true. So, we fledged a survey business in a State that almost died in the 2008 market collapse. Three years ago Linda’s sister moved to Green Valley, Arizona, and sisters being the best of friends, we changed our snowbird location. Rather than wrangling cattle for a spring drive back to Montana we spend the winters in Arizona wrangling a survey business and avoiding more bees. When the Idaho section corner monuments are buried under 18" of snow, and Linda’s knee–broken when fleeing an attack of Africanized bees–aches, we do what the cowboys of the 1870-1890s did: head south.
#Building a client base pdf#
A 1.919Mb PDF of this article as it appeared in the magazine-complete with images-is available by clicking HERE