How to read your legal description

Every deed carries a legal description, and it is the only part of the document that actually says what land you own. The street address is a mailing convenience. The legal description is the thing a court, a title company or a surveyor works from.

In Oklahoma you will run into three kinds. Most properties use one, some use two stacked together.

1. Section, township and range

This is the Public Land Survey System, and it covers most of Oklahoma. A description might read:

The Northeast Quarter of the Southwest Quarter of Section 14, Township 19 North, Range 13 East of the Indian Meridian, Tulsa County, Oklahoma

Read it backwards and it makes sense.

• Indian Meridian is the reference line. Nearly all Oklahoma descriptions measure from it. More on that here.
• Township 19 North, Range 13 East locates a six mile by six mile square, counted 19 townships north and 13 ranges east of the meridian and its baseline.
• Section 14 is one of 36 numbered one mile squares inside that township. A full section is roughly 640 acres.
• The Southwest Quarter takes the southwest 160 acres of that section.
• The Northeast Quarter of that takes the northeast 40 acres of the quarter.

So the description narrows from six miles square down to about 40 acres, each step cutting the previous piece into quarters. Once you see the pattern it reads quickly.

2. Lot and block

If your property is in a platted subdivision, the description is much shorter:

Lot 7, Block 3, Sunnyside Addition to the City of Tulsa, Tulsa County, Oklahoma, according to the recorded plat thereof

That last phrase matters. The description works by pointing at a recorded plat filed with the county, and the plat is where the actual dimensions live. To know the size and shape of Lot 7 you have to go look at the plat. Most county clerks have them available, and many are online now.

3. Metes and bounds

The oldest style, and the one that causes the most trouble. It walks the perimeter in directions and distances:

Beginning at the Southeast corner of said Section 14; thence North 89 degrees 42 minutes West a distance of 660.00 feet; thence North 00 degrees 18 minutes East a distance of 330.00 feet; thence … to the Point of Beginning

A few things to know when you see one:

• Point of beginning is where the walk starts, and the description must return to it.
• Bearings like North 89 degrees 42 minutes West are compass directions, given as an angle off due north or due south.
• Thence just means “from there.”
• Older descriptions may reference physical things: a creek, a fence, a road, a tree. Those move or disappear, which is exactly why old metes and bounds parcels are expensive to survey.

When a description does not close

A correct metes and bounds description ends exactly where it started. Plenty of older ones do not, because they were written from rough measurements or copied with an error. When a surveyor says a description “does not close,” they mean the walk ends somewhere other than the point of beginning, and somebody has to decide what the writer intended.

That is professional judgment, not arithmetic, and it is one of the reasons two surveyors can reach slightly different conclusions on the same old parcel. More on that here.

What to do with yours

Pull your deed and read the description. If it is section, township and range, you can work out roughly how much land it describes using the quarter math above. If it is lot and block, find the recorded plat. If it is metes and bounds, read it as a walk around the perimeter.

If it does not match what you thought you owned, that is worth a conversation with a surveyor before it becomes worth a conversation with a lawyer.