A surveyor will help you to corroborate what is on the title deed and the deed plan with the physical land. The measurements on paper can have a huge variance with the actual ground measurements.
You can do all due diligence and still go wrong in land investment. Yes. You heard me right. How can this be when due diligence is the expert advise that tops the list in property buying? Unknown to many property investors, there are many properties that exist on paper and on the ground which you can invest in and still burn your fingers.
Here is the reason. Many rogue property companies do subdivision and submit faulty documents to the land registries which are then duly registered. Consequently, when you go to the ground, you find that in some cases, the measurements on the mutations are not the actual ones on the ground. In other cases, you find that the implied access roads, which are supposed to be 9 meters wide, are not existent.
As a result, some property owners have to part with portions of their parcels of land to pave way for access roads. In some cases, some people lose even full plots to pave way for roads. The consequence of this is that many innocent and hard- working investors lose money ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of shillings.
To avoid these pitfalls, we advise our clients to buy 2 maps from the ministry of lands. The first one is the mutation and the second one is the Registry Map Sheet. Armed with the two maps, visit the land you want to buy and verify the details on the map. Be sure to locate all the beacons. You can also enlist the services of reputable independent surveyors or county surveyors to verify demarcation of plots (beacons and measurements) before committing your hard earned penny to any property.
