Easting for land teams
Every megawatt that survives screening still needs rights assembled across dozens to hundreds of parcels. Easting reads the instruments and tells you which ones it could verify.
A generation or transmission project's land file is not a pile of deeds. It is a chain per parcel: the conveyance that establishes what the owner owns, the easements already burdening it, the rights of way crossing it, and the recording references tying all of it together. Assembling that today means a land agent or a title researcher reading each instrument and keying every call by hand, thirty to sixty minutes for a clean document and longer for a 1975 photostat, into an enterprise land system that stores what was keyed and validates none of it.
Easting does the reading and, more importantly, does the checking: every course quoted from its source sentence, the traverse recomputed, and closure and stated acreage confirmed as two independent signals before anything is called verified. GroundTruth is the full account of the checks.
What it handles
- Recorded deeds Ships
- Metes-and-bounds descriptions with curve calls, multi-tract conveyances, and save-and-except carve-outs. The traverse is recomputed and closure-checked; stated acreage is corroborated independently.
- PLSS aliquot descriptions Ships
- “The SE 1/4 of the SW 1/4 of Section 9” resolves against BLM's public survey fabric and places itself georeferenced, no point-of-beginning click required.
- Easements and rights of way Ships
- The burden itself: easement type, width where the document states one, term, exclusivity, the rights granted, and the parcel encumbered, each with its verbatim source text. Instruments carrying courses are verified like any other traverse.
- Recording references Ships
- Book and page, instrument numbers, plat citations, and the prior conveyances a document chains back to, captured as references rather than guessed into geometry.
- Plats and utility as-builts Ships
- Identified and classified: a plat reports its subdivision, lots, blocks, and recording, and printed boundary tables get a second read that faces the same closure gate a deed does. Nothing is measured off drawn linework, and an as-built never claims a boundary.
What it refuses to draw
This is the part worth reading closely, because it is where a tool that understands recorded easements differs from one that plots shapes. Most recorded easements do not locate their own area. Easting names which case it is and declines to invent a boundary the document never described.
- Geometry only on a drawing
- The granting clause points at an attached exhibit and no courses appear anywhere in the text. Easting reports the burden and refuses to trace linework off a drawing.
- Facility-relative width
- A width is stated but the centerline follows “facilities established by the Grantee” — equipment that may not be built yet. There is no locatable area until construction fixes one.
- Blanket grant
- The easement burdens the whole described property with no width anywhere. The encumbrance is real and gets recorded; there is no boundary to draw.
- Aliquot strip
- “The North 100 feet of the West 150 feet of the SE 1/4 of the NW 1/4.” Nested metric strips with LESS and PLUS operators are captured verbatim and sent to review rather than parsed into a polygon today.
In all four cases the burden is still extracted and still recorded, with its verbatim text. What you do not get is a polygon that looks authoritative and is not. An easement plotted where the instrument never put one is worse than no easement at all, because the next person down the chain believes it.
How the easement class was qualified
Against twenty-nine recorded instruments chosen to be awkward: blanket grants, an interstate pipeline right of way, a 200-square-foot well-site easement, a temporary workspace that reverts after in-service. Twelve carried hand-annotated ground truth, and the verdicts caught three errors in it, settling one disagreement against the human with a traverse that closed to a hundredth of a foot. The full account, including what the corpus taught us about how recorded strips actually describe themselves, is on GroundTruth.
Project pricing
If your unit of purchase is the project rather than the seat, and the cost is capitalized to a project budget code, there are two packs. Both include every seat on the project team, every document class above, and the browser app and hosted API alongside the QGIS plugin.
- Project — $500, 250 documents.
- Program — $1,500, 1,000 documents.
Being straight about this: if you can administer seats, seats are cheaper. At $10 per seat per month with 50 documents included per seat, a four-person team over a six-month project has 1,200 documents included for $240, and a pack would cost you roughly twice that. The premium buys one invoice against one project code and no subscription to unwind when the project closes. That is a real thing to want, and it is the only thing it buys.
The certificate
The artifact that goes in the file has shipped. A GroundTruth Certificate of Digitization carries the verdict with its reasons, the closure ratio and misclosure, the computed area beside the area the document stated in that document's own unit, the tract drawn to scale with its courses numbered, and the call table with every course's verbatim source text. An instrument that refuses to locate itself certifies the refusal and names which case it was, since "this easement's area lives on an attached exhibit" is a finding worth filing. Here is a real one, and the guide shows where the button is.
It cannot be forged by editing the JSON. Every extraction comes back signed, and the service checks that signature before it renders a certificate, so a response with a verdict changed after the fact is refused rather than printed. That is the difference between a deliverable and a decoration.
What comes next for this work
Named so you can judge whether the sequence matches your calendar rather than discovering it later. Batch runs and DXF export both shipped, so a hundred-parcel job goes up as one submission and the drawing goes to the CAD side of the work. Georeferencing assist is next: a suggested point of beginning from county parcel fabric, as a suggestion an operator confirms, never an automatic accept.
Start with a document we have never seen
The fastest way to settle whether this works on your instruments is to run one. A recorded easement from a county you actually work in, ideally an ugly one. You get back the extraction with every call tied to the sentence it came from, the verdict, the reasons, and a certificate you can file. Where an instrument grants something it never located, it names which case it hit instead of drawing a polygon the document does not describe.
Start free takes no card: three documents that never expire, and the QGIS plugin can do the whole signup without opening a browser. The verification story is the same one behind every Easting product — see GroundTruth for what the verdicts mean and how the layer was qualified, or easement extraction for the document class on its own.