(upbeat music)
- Hey guys, what's going on.
This is Seth from the REtipster Blog.
I wanted to show you a quick trick here in Google Earth.
If you're ever in a position where you need to
provide or find measurements for a property,
say if you're not sure the dimensions of it,
if you want to know how many feet of road frontage
or lake frontage or whatever frontage it has,
there's a really cool tool in Google Earth
that allows you to do this without much headache.
I'll show you how it works here.
I'm kind of picking a spot at random here.
So this is a development that I know about
that has some houses in it and still a lot of vacant lots.
Let's say for example we wanted to get some
dimensions on this house right here.
Say we want to just know how many feet is it
from this point of their lot to this point.
So how much road frontage do they have
and how long is it from the road all the way
to the back of their property?
If somebody ever asks you that or if
you just want to know for yourself,
Google Earth has this tool up here
where you can click on this and then
go over here and click on the measurements tab
and you can tell it whether you want it to
measure the property in miles, yards, feet, inches,
kilometers, meters, centimeters.
So pretty much wherever you're at in the world,
you should be able to find the right type
of measurement that you're looking for.
I'm gonna go ahead and click on feet and click OK.
And what we want to do here once we've zoomed into the point
that we can get a pretty good, clear shot of this,
is we take this little crosshair thing.
And for this particular property
I know that the lot line starts right here
on the other side of this sidewalk,
it doesn't go all the way to the road.
So we're gonna click right here
and then drag it all the way over to here
and that tell us right up here
that's approximately 181 feet.
Or at least the distance between the two points
that I just drew is 181 feet.
Or say if we wanted to cancel here and start over again,
click this again, go back and hit feet again.
And let's say we want to know
what the distance is of the road frontage that they've got.
So we could click this and then go over here
and click that again and that's about 102 feet.
I would guess that if we got an actual survey
on this property it would probably say exactly 100 feet.
Now something we can do once we know
what the approximate dimensions are
of this side and this side and this side and this side
is go ahead and calculate what is the actual land area
of this property.
So we can go ahead and open up Google
and then just type in something like
square footage acre calculator,
something to that effect,
and it will bring up this nice little calculator.
Say if we knew that this property was 100 feet by 180 feet.
Let's open up this little calculator here
and just do that math.
100 times 180, 18000 square feet.
So we can go ahead and put this in here,
and that tells us that this is 0.41 acres in size.
So right there, again, this is not the same as a survey.
This is not like a hundred percent accurate
but I would say it's reasonably accurate
because it's pretty easy to see
where the property lines are just based
on where the lawn is mowed.
So say if you were looking to buy this house
or say if you owned this house
and you were looking to sell it,
and you just wanted to find out
approximately what the square footage is
or what the acreage was of the property
or how many feet of frontage it had on any angle,
it's really pretty easy to do that
with this measurement tool here in Google Earth.
You just have to draw the lines.
It will tell you what the numbers are
and you can go ahead and do the rest of the math
and come up with a number.
Keep in mind, if you're working with vacant land,
like for example, there's a few lots over here,
I don't even really know how many lots are there,
and some more over here.
In a case like this, to get a more educated idea,
you'd have to go to the county's GIS mapping system
and sort of use that as a reference guide.
So I've actually got that pulled up right here
and this is the exact same subdivision.
As you can see this actually tells us
where the property lines are and we can get
a much better idea for where we would have to
start drawing the lines over here in Google Earth.
If you're really lucky, the GIS mapping system
may even have a similar function within it,
or sometimes when you go ahead and click on
the property itself it'll even tell you
what the acreage is of each property.
So that's another thing to look for
if you're lucky enough to have a county
that has a good GIS mapping system like this.
You could find an abundance of information there as well.
For example, I see this one right here says measurement.
If I were to go ahead and click on this,
not really sure what these things do.
Say if I wanted to click on this one,
give this a shot, see what it tells me.
So I could go ahead and click right here.
Look at that, that's pretty nice.
So that's telling me that this is 254.2 feet.
Keep going here, that's pretty nice.
Looks like this county's got a really good system.
It's almost easier than Google Earth.
A lot of times these counties will not have
such sophisticated systems like this,
so if they don't Google Earth should be able
to help you out pretty much anywhere on Earth.
You would just have to use the county's
mapping system to simply find where
the property boundaries are approximately
and then sort of translate it over to this
and make your drawings here.
And I will say again,
this is not the same thing as a survey.
And if you do go down this route
of actually trying to make these measurements yourself,
if you're just doing it for your own knowledge
that's fine because you know you're not a surveyor
and you know that there is probably
some margin of error in here.
But if you're going to provide this
to somebody else whose looking to buy
a property that you're trying to sell
you may just want to disclose that
this is just kind of an approximation
and you're not a hundred percent certain
and if they want to be a hundred percent certain
they would have to get a survey
to be absolutely sure of it.
But at least you could give them
somewhat of an educated guess for what the measurements are.
I wouldn't say this is something
I have to use on every deal I do
but occasionally I do have questions about distances.
Especially when the county's website
or the data service that I'm using
doesn't provide this information.
And Google Earth gives you a really easy way
to get that pretty quickly.
So hopefully that helps, thanks for watching,
and I will see you next time.