Survey dispute leaves family fighting for home

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – A St. Augustine man had just moved into his first home with his fiancée and kids a month ago, and now he's been served with legal documents asking him to leave.

The incident took place in St Augustine in the College Park area where Darin Matthew-Wingate was recently served with ejectment papers that state he's in a home that is not on a property that he actually owns.

But Matthew-Wingate is just one of multiple people that are also being served with ejectment papers, and they said that multiple parties were at fault.

"I'm a first-time homebuyer. I'm 26 years old. I've never had to deal with anything like this. I mean this is something you hear in a bad movie," Matthew-Wingate said.

The issues comes because of an old map that the St. Johns County property appraisers office used to originally show where the homes should lie.

But a new survey map, completed in April, shows that the homes should have been built in a different location, and that's the map that Rusty Law Firm and their clients are using to tell Matthew-Wingate and several of his neighbors that they need to move.

Pointing to the map Matthew-Wingate said, "This is where the conflicting survey line starts to unfold. As you can see on this survey compared to the last, this house is on another property and this house is on another property and they're all skewed this way."

Representatives with Rusty Law Firm, who is handling several of these ejectment suits, said that their client has a stronger legal claim to the property, and they said the most recent survey shows that. The firm also said they sympathize with the defendants, but are requesting that they leave.

The county property appraiser's office said that they are familiar with questionable property lines in the College Park area, but they said that disputes between parties over the land are civil matters.

"What we found out is that the county was aware in the College Park subdivision that there were surveying and/or boundary issues going on all the way back to 2009. There was property still being sold there that some people bought new survey and some people with the old survey," Matthew-Wingate said.

Stephen Collins of Land Title of America said that there are some things that residents can do to prevent these risks from even happening.

  • First get an owners title policy
  • Make sure you're you get a survey so that the owners title policy protects you against issues pertaining to a survey like encroachments,
  • Finally get an Alta 9 endorsement because that will not only insure what the title is, but it will also ensure where it is supposed to relate to.

For Matthew-Wingate he said he did have all three of those things so he has acquired an attorney and will be moving forward in this case.