Buying a house comes with guardrails — a lender who requires an appraisal, an inspection everyone expects, a closing process that's been repeated a million times. Cash land purchases skip most of that, which means nobody is checking anything on your behalf unless you hire them to.

What a survey establishes

A licensed surveyor physically locates the parcel's legal boundaries and marks the corners. On vacant land this answers questions that genuinely can't be answered any other way:

• Where the property actually is. County GIS maps are not survey-grade and can be off by a meaningful margin. The fence is very often not the line.
• Whether the acreage is real.Deeds from older subdivisions sometimes describe more or less than what's there.
• Encroachments.A neighbor's shed, driveway, or fence sitting on your parcel is far easier to resolve before closing than after.
• Where you can actually build, once setbacks, easements and topography are drawn on the same page.

Ask specifically what type you're getting. A boundary survey is the baseline; a mortgage location survey is cheaper and less thorough; an ALTA survey is the most detailed and usually overkill for a residential lot.

If there's a recent survey, you may not need a new one

Ask the seller whether one exists and when it was done. A survey from a few years ago on a parcel where nothing has changed may be perfectly adequate. An old one where corners have gone missing, or where neighboring parcels have been split, usually isn't. Your title company can advise on whether they'll rely on it.

Why title problems cluster on vacant land

Land often changes hands rarely, sits in estates, gets split informally among heirs, or passes through tax sales. Each of those is a chance for a defect to enter the chain of title and stay there. Common ones:

• Heirs who were never properly bought out and still hold a fractional interest
• Old mortgages or liens that were paid but never formally released
• Unpaid property taxes, or a prior tax deed with a clouded chain
• Boundary descriptions that don't close or that conflict with the neighbor's deed
• Severed mineral rights nobody mentioned

A title search finds these. Title insurance covers you if one surfaces later that the search missed.

Read Schedule B — this is the important part

When the title commitment arrives, most buyers skim it. Schedule B lists the exceptions — everything the policy will not cover. That list is effectively a complete inventory of every easement, restriction and encumbrance recorded against the parcel.

Read every line and ask what each one means in practice. If something is unclear, ask before closing, not after. This document is where easements and deed restrictions become visible, and it's the cheapest hour of due diligence you'll do.

Owner's policy vs. lender's policy

If you finance, the lender will require a lender's policy — which protects the lender, not you. The owner's policy is the one that protects your equity, and it's usually a one-time premium at closing. Buying land in cash means nobody requires either one, which is exactly why cash land buyers are the ones who most often skip it and most often regret it.

Where it's reasonable to economize

Due diligence costs money, and on a cheap parcel the costs can feel disproportionate. A sensible order: do the free checks first — zoning, flood zone, wetlands, county records — and only spend real money once a parcel survives them. Then title search, then perc test, then survey. That way you're paying for depth only on parcels that have already cleared the cheap filters. The full sequence is in the due diligence checklist.