Property Rights and Legal Descriptions

Property Rights can be split up in multiple ways.  Four ways to split up property rights are, surface of the land, mineral rights, water rights, and air rights.  All four of these have different, specific rights and are mostly self explanatory. During our daily lives we mostly use our rights to the surface of the land because that is where houses are built.  In Texas, air rights are the least important, and mineral rights can be extremely important depending on where you live in Texas and if you have any oil or gas on your land.  When purchasing land you need to be very careful on what you are actually buying and what rights are coming with the property.  


Now, what is a legal description? It is the specification of the exact boundaries of the land being purchased.  An exact legal description is required to be in the documents when transferring title of the property.  There are three common used ways to obtain legal descriptions of land:

~Rectangular survey system: Based on principle meridians that run north and south and base lines that run east and west.

This is how a rectangular survey is split up.

~Metes-and-bounds: Distances and directions of the boundaries that enclose a piece of land.

~Recorded Plats: Engineers' drawings of parcels of real estate.

This is a recorded plat from The Barracks Townhomes, where I live.  This plat also has the metes-and-bounds underneath the actual plat.