This plot describes a tract 37.7 acres in area with a closure of less than 0.004 feet!  Now that is just amazing.  I love the graceful curve that forms the northeast side of the tract.  It must be a river or creek.  Of course, the “curve” is all made up of straight lines, but there are enough of them to give a very impressive curve effect.

Now, on to the main subject of this entry.  This entry is for the beginners out there who have found the site and know that they need to use it somehow, but don’t really know what they’re doing. Maybe they’re a landowner looking at the deed to their own property, or somebody just getting started in the real estate business. Well, this little primer should be able to get you on your way to plotting tracts in just a few minutes.

In general, there are four ways of legally describing a piece of land. The first (and least precise) way is to list the tracts that surround it. While it may have been sufficient at one point in the past to say that Farmer Eli’s farm is east of Farmer Abe’s, south of Farmer Bob’s, north of Farmer Coy’s, and west of Farmer Doc’s, such descriptions don’t hold much water in today’s world. The second method (more about which later) is a metes and bounds description. The third method is to refer to a plat or map which contains a drawing of the tract, which includes measurements, angles and possibly other information as well. This is the usual method for describing tracts within cities and subdivisions; a plat is filed with the County Clerk or other government registrar, and subsequent references to the tracts therein are referred to by numbered spaces on the plat, usually Blocks and Lots. The fourth and final way is by referring to the Public Lands Survey System method by which most of the United States was surveyed. I may talk about that method another day, but for now suffice it to say that Tract Plotter does NOT currently recognize such tracts.

Tract Plotter is a way of bridging the gap between the 2nd and 3rd methods of tract description; that is, it is a way to create a visual plat from a metes and bounds legal description. However, a plat is only as good as the information fed into it. If your description has many lines like “in a northerly direction to an Elm tree 14 inches in diameter,” then you might as well give up now. There is simply no way to create a decent plat from such imprecise measurements. “Northerly” is not a direction. If you come across such a description, however, all is not lost. You can still reconstruct a description for the tract on the basis of other, later descriptions. For example, if the tract was divided into two separate tracts which were later sold separately, hopefully there were decent descriptions for both of those descendant tracts, and you can piece the two together in order to figure out how the original tract was shaped. Sometimes you may have to follow the tract through two or three generations before you can get a reliable description; but when you have one, you can work your way backwards to get a description for the original tract.

Now, what makes for a good legal description? Every call needs to have a solid numerical distance and a bearing. The distance part is fairly easy to understand. A distance could be 20 feet, 90 yards, 33 varas, 92 links, or what have you. Each distance contains a number and a unit. There are many units that have been used to describe land in the US, and Tract Plotter understands most of them. (Let me know if there are any that I’ve missed! I’m particularly interested to know of varas other than Texas varas, which are 33 1/3 inches.) So distance is no problem as long as you know the units. Most modern tracts in the US are measured in feet, and feet are the default unit in Tract Plotter. So if your description uses feet, you don’t have to worry about including units in your input.

The only “gotcha” when it comes to units is compound units, e.g. feet and inches. Tract Plotter only uses decimal representations of single units, and as such, does not recognize compound units. For example, if you have a legal description that says “104 feet, 5 inches” then you will need to manually translate this distance into 104.416f.

Bearings, on the other hand, have been known to cause confusion. Cardinal directions, such as due North, are easy enough to understand. However, most tracts do not run in pure cardinal directions. A typical bearing might read “North 30 West”. All that this means is that the line runs 30 degrees westward of North. Here is what North 30 West looks like:

Note the blue dot. That is the starting point. The line travels N30W from that starting point. To show you why this is important, here is South 30 East:

“But that’s the same line!” you protest. Indeed it is. However, the starting point is different. In this example we have started at a point (the blue dot) and then travelled along a line headed 30 degrees East of South. So, here we have our first important finding: Every boundary line in a tract can be described in two different ways. You can start at one end and work your way in one direction, or you can start at the other end and work your way the other direction.  The way to switch directions is pretty simple; simply swap the “N” or “S”, and the “W” or “E” in the bearing.  Leave the bearing degrees, minutes, and seconds alone; and leave the distance alone.  However, both the N/S and the E/W parts of the bearing must be swapped.  Look at the example above and you will see why.  A line that runs NW is the same as a line that runs SE, but different from a line that runs NE or SW.

Now, a couple more things to finish up the treatment of bearings.  You may recall that there are 360 degrees in a circle.  However, since we effectively divide up the circle into 4 quadrants with the N/S and E/W bearing calls, we really only have to deal with 90 degrees as the maximum number in the bearing.  Tract Plotter accepts cardinal bearings such as “N” or “W”, so you don’t have to waste your time if a bearing says “North 90 degrees West”, which translates as due west.  You can just enter “W” into Tract Plotter and save a little time, although “N90W” is valid as well.  Tract Plotter will also handle nonsensical bearings such as”N120W” (which really should be written S60W), although, if you find such a bearing in a description, it is likely to be in error.  I will probably fix this at one point and restrict the maximum bearing angle to 90 degrees, but for now I will leave it as is.

Finally, we get to the issue of degrees, minutes, and seconds.  As stated above, there are 360 degrees in a circle, but we only really use up to 90 of them in a bearing.  A degree is divided into 60 minutes, and each minute is divided into 60 seconds.  The usual symbol to indicate degrees is a little circle like this: °.  Minutes and seconds are usually denoted in the same way that they are in the context of time; i.e., a single quote ‘ for minutes, and a double-quote ” for seconds.  However, these often are not terribly practical for data entry purposes (especially the degree symbol, which is not on most keyboards and requires a special key combination to enter into most computers).  For this reason, Tract Plotter simply uses the standard period to delineate between degrees, minutes, and seconds.  For example, the translation of the deed call North 48 degrees 32 minutes 19 seconds West or N 48° 32′ 19″ W would be N48.32.19W.  If your deed lacks minutes and/or seconds, simply leave them out.  If you have a leading zero for any of the units, e.g. N 08° 03′ 06″ W then you can omit the zeroes: N8.3.6W (although you may want to include them for your own sake; personally, I usually include all digits, including zeroes, so that all of my deed calls line up in the Tract Plotter entry box).

Well, that wraps up this week’s blog entry.  Please comment if you have any questions or feel that I left out anything basic in this post.  Next week I will get more into some of the finer points of metes and bounds descriptions.

As always, please feel free to let me know if you come across a plot where the acreage is obviously wrong.  Please only do this if you are sure that the plot is otherwise well-formed, i.e. it closes fairly cleanly and no errors are shown.  If you do come across this, please leave a comment on the blog.

I am getting “back into the swing of things” after a hiatus from programming.  I must admit that I had a bit of a mental block to getting the above-mentioned errors fixed, as they meant a re-writing of a large portion of the site’s most basic programming.  However, now that that’s done, I am free to move towards larger changes.  In particular, I want to get the site to a revenue-generating state by the end of the year for tax purposes.  I have a game-plan in mind for how to implement arcs, which will only be available in the paid version.  Also, paid users will be able to save any plot and come back to it at a later time.  Joining of multiple plots will also be easy and fast (although I have noticed that some people have figured out a way to do this with the existing site by careful manipulation of the deed calls). Of course paid users will also be able to resize the plat size as large as I can practically make them (at least big enough to fill an 8×11 sheet of paper).

From time to time, I browse the submitted plots (I have all of them saved) and I am frequently amazed by some of the huuuuge plots you guys are making!  Not necessarily huge in terms of acreage, but huge in terms of having many calls which create very interesting-looking tracts. Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

This tract is 264 acres in area and has a perimeter of over 20,000 linear feet. And it closes to within 28 feet! Nice work! I like the little 30-foot square chunk out of the northmost northeast corner. I think I will make a weekly thing out of this, posting a new and interesting tract every week. Privacy should not be a concern, as everything is completely anonymous, and of course nobody knows where a given tract is actually located in the country, or even in the world. Yes, we even have some users from the UK and a few other locations outside the United States that apparently use metes and bounds descriptions.

In fact, I will give some site statistics as well, as it’s kind of a fun thing and I’m happy with the site’s growth so far. As of today, there have been over 7,000 unique users of the site (people who have come to the site and submitted a plot at least once). You have submitted just over 92,000 plots since the site opened in February of 2007. The current rate is approximately 400 users per month and 3000-4000 plots per month. Almost 800 of you have signed up for update e-mails, of which I have not yet sent any. Based on a simplistic reading of these e-mail addresses, we have real estate agents, landmen, real estate developers, lawyers, and members of state and federal government agencies using the site. Pretty neat! I never thought the site would find such a wide range of uses.

Well, that wraps up this edition of the blog. I hope to make more regular posts in the future and have some definite progress on the paid site.

One of the first things you learn in geometry is that area is proportional to the square of linear distance.  The perimeter is a linear distance; the area is proportional to the square of the perimeter, therefore the calculated area error should be proportional to the square of the perimeter area.  As soon as I think of a way of implementing this without going completely nuts with the acreage error, I will fix it.

By the way, my reason for including this figure at all is just to draw the your attention to the fact that you have a problem of some severity with your plot.  Competing products (*ahem, <REDACTED**>*) will just adjust the calculated acreage, based on the error, and never inform you of that fact.  So if you input a square tract 200ft on a side, you will get 40,000 sf; but if you make an “error” and make one of the sides 205ft instead of 200, <REDACTED> will tell you that the actual acreage is MORE than 40,000 sf!  I know that a lot of sophisticated analysis probably went into solving this problem in <REDACTED>, but in my opinion this is the wrong way to go, and in fact it is a fairly ludicrous proposition.  I would rather leave that sort of judgment call to the user instead of having a one-size-fits-all calculated solution.  If the plot doesn’t close properly, the user can decide whether the acreage is right or not, and whether it should be adjusted up or down, or even whether the deed calls themselves should be altered to fix the problem (I know we have all come across transposed digits, missing digits, or otherwise mutilated deed calls).  I would rather give the “right” acreage, based on the input data, than include a “fudge factor” that in no way should be taken for gospel.

By the way, another thing that I do in terms of stating the error is truncate the number of significant digits in the acreage results.  If there is an error of > 10%, you only get 2 significant digits; 1% – 10%, 3; 0.1% – 1%, 4; and <0.1%, 5 significant digits.  This is just another kind of a “seat of the pants” error detection that I have included.  So if your tract doesn’t close by 20%, Tract Plotter is not going to tell you that it’s 42.385 acres.  It’s going to be 42, and even that is probably too generously precise, but I find less than 2 significant digits to be pretty worthless.  On the other end of the curve, more than 5 SD’s is probably better than any surveyor could ever trust his instruments.  But, as always, I leave the final decision up to you, as you can always see the full calculated value, out to as many SD’s as the computer can handle, by clicking on the “Show Full Precision” checkbox.

I definitely want to improve this significant digit algorithm in future versions, taking into account the precision of all entered data.  But, for now, I think it serves its purpose, and I hope that you find it useful.

**<REDACTED> refers to a leading provider of deed plotting software which, in my own personal opinion, cannot distinguish between legitimate criticism and libel. In this blog posting, I have accurately described the behavior of <REDACTED> software, but they seem to think this constitutes libel. In the interest of avoiding further legal hassles, I have removed their name from this blog entry. However, I believe that my criticism stands. Software should not provide surprise results. A tract with sides of 200ft, 200ft, 200ft, and 205ft, all at 90-degree angles to each other, should not return an area greater than 40,000sf. It should provide an area of 40,000ft exactly and let the user know that this might be wrong, preferably with a stated margin of error.

As for progress on the site: I am sad to say that there has not been much progress since the last blog entry.  My job, some out-of-town trips, and a family member in the hospital have kept me away from working on the site as much as I would have liked.  I am now setting an end-of-August target date for moving everything to the new server facility, and the rewrite for end-of-September.  Full “pay site” functionality will probably not happen before the end of the year.

Moving on to other topics…. Marty asked in comments for my insights on mineral acres.  Well, there really isn’t too much to say about mineral acres.  Usually you talk about mineral acres as being distinct from the actual acreage of a tract; i.e., we are talking about a partial mineral interest.  For example, maybe somebody owns a 50% mineral interest in a 10-acre tract.  This means that they have 5 net mineral acres, but the important thing is that those 5 net mineral acres are inseparable from the entire 10-acre tract.  It is like owning a half interest in a company; you can’t say that the inventory is yours and the physical plant and intellectual property is the other owner’s; you both own a 50% interest in the entire thing.  Or if you are a 20% partner in ownership of a racehorse, you cannot say that you own the head while the other partners own the rest of the body; you each have a 20% interest in the entire horse.

This is why we often see mineral interests referred to as “undivided” mineral interests.  To beat a dead horse, no pun intended, if you own the aforementioned 5 net mineral acres, you cannot point to any particular 5 acres of the 10-acre tract and say that you own those 5 mineral acres while somebody else owns the other 5.  If you wanted to, you could approach the other mineral owner(s) and negotiate to convey your 50% to them on 5 of the acres, and they would convey to you their 50% on the other 5 acres, and then you would have a 100% mineral interest in 5 acres and so would they (instead of each owning 50% of 10 acres).  Either way, it’s the same net mineral acreage, and this is probably not a terribly practical scenario for most people.  But, it could be done.  I’m only using it here to illustrate the concept of partial mineral ownership and how mineral acres are derived from the total acreage of the property.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and nothing that I write here or elsewhere should be construed as constituting legal, financial, or any other kind of advice.  My knowledge is limited to Texas, which takes a “bundle of rights” view of mineral ownership, and I know that all of the different states have their own take on mineral ownership.  Texas’ body of oil and gas law is generally acknowledged to be the most established and complicated out of all the states’, as Texas was where the oil boom originally occurred, and oil and gas concerns have continued pretty consistently to the present day.

I would like to fill you all in on the plans for the site. First off, the part that you see right now for free will always be there, for free. It will even be improved somewhat, but it will always be a little watered down. However, it will probably be sufficient for 90% of your tract plotting needs. It is for me! Most of the time I just want to know three things about a metes and bounds description: 1) Does it close? 2) Is the acreage correct? 3) What does it look like? The existing free site that you see can do all three of those things pretty well. I know I have a bug or two in the acreage calculations, but fortunately they don’t pop up in most tracts.

But I do want to eventually make money with this site. So I will have a paid section as well. You will be able to log in with your user name, and all of your plotted tracts will be there, organized in folders that you can arrange as you like. You will be able to use arcs in your tracts. You will be able to join multiple plots together, as many as you like, in an easy-to-use interface. You will be able to alter the scale of any plot that you make, to match any scale you desire when you print it out. You will be able to share your plots with other users that you work with. I am even planning to allow overlays to Google Maps so that you can lay out your tracts on photographs of the actual terrain. These are just some of the features that I’m planning to include in the final version. Please comment below if you have a certain feature that you’d like to see, even if it’s one I already mentioned. I’d like to get an idea of which features are most useful to other users.

When I do finally release the pay site, it will have a small monthly fee. I am thinking $5 or $10. Or maybe $5 and $10, if I can figure out some way of having two levels of service. I think the monthly fee is the way to go. All of the competing products that I know of are $150-$200, and they are standalone pieces of software. They have to be installed on one computer, so they can’t be used on any computer with an internet connection. They generally don’t include upgrades in the purchase price, so if you want the new version then you will have to pay again. And they will not see the level of support that I will be able to provide. Bug fixes, custom features, you name it, and it will be a lot easier for me to do than any of those other guys. Of course I will offer a discount if you wish to pay yearly, and I will also offer multiple user discounts.

I am working right now on a full bottom-up rewrite of the site. I have a “hidden” area that I have used for my own personal needs for over a year now that has already implemented most of the features I listed above. Unfortunately I have come to the realization that the current site’s acreage calculations are unreliable in a basic way (again — fortunately this occurs infrequently! but it is indicator of an underlying problem), and therefore almost the whole thing will need to be rewritten. So I am in the middle of that right now. I am also in the process of moving the server from a shared hosting solution to a dedicated, colocated server. I have bought the physical server and rented the colocation space for it, but I still have yet to get the server fully configured and installed at the facility. Hopefully I can get this done in the next month (by July) and have the site transition to the new server during that time. The rewrite and availability of the pay site will take a little longer, but hopefully I will be able to fix the known calculation bugs in the free site within the same timeframe of the server installation.

So there you have it, that’s the current status of the site and a broad idea of the goal that I’m working toward. Please feel free to comment with suggestions, problems, ideas, bugs, and anything else that you might want to say. I realize that I have not been communicating effectively on the site status, and the whole site has been pretty mysterious to everyone up to this point. I hope to change that with this blog, so at least you will know that yes, there is an actual person here, and yes, I am working on the site

Thanks for reading!