A land search tells you what the register says. A survey tells you what is actually there. They are different questions and both have to be asked.
Beacons are the physical markers, usually concrete, set at the corners of a parcel. The deed plan or registry map is the registry's record of where those corners are. A survey is a licensed surveyor confirming that the two agree.
Why this is not a formality
The commonest disappointments in Kenyan land purchase are not forged titles. They are boundary problems, and they are ordinary:
- Beacons missing. Removed, buried, built over, or never properly set.
- Beacons moved. By a neighbour, by a previous owner, or during an earlier subdivision.
- The parcel is smaller than described. The acreage on the title and the acreage on the ground differ.
- Encroachment. A neighbour's wall, structure or planting sits inside your boundary, or yours sits inside theirs.
- The land shown is not the land on the title. A seller walks a buyer around a parcel that is not the one described in the documents, which is a straightforward fraud and a common one.
- Access is assumed. The parcel is landlocked, or the road used to reach it crosses somebody else's land with no registered right of way.
Every one of those is cheap to discover before purchase and expensive afterwards.
What a surveyor does
- Obtains the deed plan or registry map for the parcel.
- Locates the beacons on the ground, or establishes where they should be.
- Confirms the parcel matches the plan in shape, dimension and position.
- Re-establishes missing beacons where that is possible.
- Identifies encroachments and anything inconsistent with the plan.
- Confirms access, and whether it is a registered right or an assumption.
The subdivision case
Where a parcel is being subdivided, or is part of a recent subdivision, there is an additional layer: the subdivision itself has to have been properly done and registered, with new numbers and new plans issued.
Buying a plot from a scheme where the subdivision is "in process" means buying something that does not yet exist as a registrable parcel. That is a materially different transaction from buying a registered parcel, and it should be recognised as one before rather than after.
Sequencing
The survey belongs before money moves, with the search and the identity verification. Not after the deposit, and not on completion day.
A useful order for a buyer, all of it ahead of payment: instruct an advocate, conduct the search, verify identity against the title, commission the survey, confirm rates and rent are clear, establish any consents required, and only then deal with money.
What goes wrong
The buyer walks the land with the seller and considers that a survey. Walking a boundary somebody else is pointing at is not a confirmation of anything.
The deed plan is never obtained. Without it there is nothing to compare the ground to.
Access is assumed from the fact that a car reached the plot. A track that exists is not the same as a right to use it.
The survey is done after the deposit. At which point a boundary problem is a negotiation conducted by somebody who has already paid.