Legal Description of Property: What It Is, Types and How to Find Yours

No. The Jefferson County assessor's page says it in one line: "An address does not qualify as a legal description." An address is how mail and emergency services find a building. It can change when a city renames a street or renumbers a block, and it says nothing about where the land begins and ends.

A legal description is tied to the land and to the public record. It stays the same when the street name changes, and it is what a title search uses to match a deed to the right parcel. A deed that uses only a street address is risky, because the address may point to more than one parcel or to part of one.

This is the form most homeowners in a subdivision see. A developer divides land into lots, a surveyor draws the plat, and the plat is recorded with the county. The Jefferson County assessor describes the plat as a survey that has gone through planning approval, where "The parcels are assigned numbers or letters for block, lot or tracts to identify them on the map."

A lot and block description therefore points to the recorded plat. An invented example, only to show the format: "Lot 12, Block 3, Oak Hill Subdivision, according to the plat recorded in Plat Book 8, page 41, public records of the county." To find the exact boundaries, you open the recorded plat, which is a map filed with the county. See plat map for how to read one.

New York City uses a related idea. Its parcels are identified by borough, block and lot, and the three numbers together are called a BBL. See what is a BBL for that system.

A metes and bounds description walks the boundary. The Jefferson County glossary calls it "a way of describing a property that is not in a subdivision by using bearings and distances," and adds that it may also use attributes such as a road, a creek, other recorded documents and monuments on the ground. A surveyor writes these descriptions.

Because it follows the ground, it can be hard to read. It starts at a point of beginning, runs a bearing and distance along each side, and returns to the start. Errors in one measurement can leave the shape unclosed. The separate guide to metes and bounds shows how to read one line by line.

Much of the central and western United States was surveyed in a grid. The Stanford Libraries guide says the Public Land Survey System "is also known as the township and range system or the rectangular survey system." A description names a tract by its section, township and range, and ends with the principal meridian that anchors the grid.

The Colorado manual gives the arithmetic: "sections are commonly divided into half sections containing 320 acres, quarter sections containing 160 acres, and so forth." Its example of a 40-acre parcel is the northeast quarter of the southeast quarter of section 6, township 3 north, range 6 west, 6th Principal Meridian. Where a tract is irregular, the grid uses numbered government lots: "Government lots are given individual lot numbers rather than being described by compass directions."

The Stanford guide shows the same location in a shorter coded form for a Nevada parcel: Township 38 North, Range 56 East, Section 10, with the fractions of the section after it. The words and the codes mean the same thing.

A title search follows a parcel through time, not a street address. The recorder indexes most documents by the names of the parties, so the searcher uses the legal description to confirm that every deed and mortgage found for a name really concerns this parcel and not another one the same person owned.

This matters most where the clerk's index does not carry a parcel number. In those counties, matching a document to the property depends on reading its legal description. HeritageDeed's McLennan County, Texas coverage works that way: the report ties each document to the property by its legal description and marks any it could link only by the owner's name.

The legal description also changes over time. A parcel can be split, merged, or replatted, and each change creates a new description. A deed that uses an old description may still be good, but the searcher has to follow the property forward to the current lot.

HeritageDeed reports the deeds, mortgages and liens recorded on a property in the counties on the title search coverage page. A report costs $49. A report starts from a street address and resolves it to the county's parcel, which is the step that connects an address to a legal description. It is not title insurance, a survey or legal advice, and it does not confirm that a legal description is correct.