Legal description

Key Takeaways

• A legal description identifies a parcel precisely enough to convey it, using metes and bounds, lot and block from a recorded plat, or the government rectangular survey.
• A street address is not a legal description. Addresses are assigned for mail and emergency response, they change, and more than one unit can share one.
• RCW 65.04.045 requires the first page of a recorded instrument to carry an abbreviated legal description, meaning lot, block, plat, or section, township, range, and quarter/quarter section, plus a reference to the page holding the full description.
• Government survey descriptions in Washington are measured from the Willamette Meridian, and a section is usually 640 acres, so a quarter of a quarter section is 40 acres.

What It Means

A legal description is the written identification of a parcel's boundaries, exact enough that a surveyor could walk out and mark the same ground every time. It is what a Deed, a deed of trust, a plat, and a title policy all rely on to say which piece of the earth they mean.

Three recognized methods do that work. A Metes And Bounds description traces the perimeter, starting at a point of beginning and running a series of calls with directions and distances until it closes back on that same point. The Plat Map Lot And Block Survey System identifies land by its lot and block on a subdivision plat that has already been surveyed and recorded, which is why most city and suburban descriptions are short. The Government Survey system, also called the rectangular survey, locates land by township, range, and section, then subdivides the section into quarters and quarters of quarters.

None of the three is a street address. Addresses are assigned by local government for mail and emergency response, they get renumbered, and several units can share one. A document that identifies land only by address does not tell a title examiner or a surveyor where the boundaries run.

How It Works in Washington

In Washington, the recording system is built around the legal description. RCW 65.04.045(1)(f) requires the first page of any instrument presented to a county auditor to carry "an abbreviated legal description of the property," which the statute defines as "lot, block, plat, or section, township, range, and quarter/quarter section," along with a reference to the document page where the full legal description appears. The same subsection calls for the assessor's property tax parcel or account number, set out separately from the legal description.

The description also has to be adequate inside the instrument, not only on the cover page. RCW 64.04.010 requires a deed for every conveyance of real estate or any interest in it, and RCW 64.04.020 requires that deed to be in writing, signed by the party bound, and acknowledged. Washington courts have long added a further requirement on top of those form rules, holding that the writing itself has to describe the land well enough to identify it. That is the reason closers and title examiners insist on the complete description rather than the address the parties use in conversation.

Which method appears depends on the land. For platted ground the description points at a recorded plat, and RCW 58.17.020 defines a plat as "a map or representation of a subdivision" and a final plat as the drawing "prepared for filing for record with the county auditor." For unplatted ground the rectangular survey supplies the coordinates, and the Bureau of Land Management notes that "all lands in the states of Washington and Oregon are measured from the Willamette Meridian," with each township broken into 36 sections of roughly 640 acres each.

Example

Anh buys unplatted acreage in Kittitas County for $295,000. Her deed describes it as the northeast quarter of the southwest quarter of Section 12, Township 27 North, Range 32 East, Willamette Meridian. Read the way a surveyor reads it, smallest piece first, that is one quarter of one quarter of a 640 acre section, so the parcel is 40 acres.

Her neighbor sells a lot in town the same week. That deed reads Lot 7, Block 3, Sunset Terrace Addition, according to the plat recorded in the records of Kittitas County, Washington, and page one of the document shows the abbreviated form, Lot 7, Blk 3, Sunset Terrace, next to the assessor's parcel number, as RCW 65.04.045 requires. Two descriptions in completely different words do the same job.

Then escrow catches that Anh's title commitment says Section 21 where the deed says Section 12. The file stops until the documents agree, because that one digit points at a different section, which is a different square mile of the township, and no amount of matching street addresses would have caught it.

Common Mistakes and Exam Traps

• A street address, an assessor's parcel number, and a legal description are three different things, and only the legal description fixes the boundaries.
• A metes and bounds description has to close, returning to the point of beginning. A description that ends anywhere else contains an error in one of the calls.
• Read government survey descriptions smallest piece first. The northeast quarter of the southwest quarter of a 640 acre section is 40 acres, not 160.
• The abbreviated legal description on page one of a recorded document is an indexing convenience under RCW 65.04.045, never a replacement for the full description inside the document.