The drone guy found a fence line that had been wrong for thirty years
I've been sitting on 90 acres of mixed timber and pasture for a long time and finally decided to market off the back 30 as one tract. Hired a pilot who does mostly land work, Part 107, has his own mapping software, charges a flat per-shoot rate plus more if you want an orthomosaic on top of the video.
He flew the perimeter first because he wanted to know where he could put the transitions. Then he came over to the tailgate with the tablet and said, your fence doesn't match your deed. From 300 feet up you could see the old wire running in a lazy curve through the pines and the actual line, which he'd overlaid from the county parcel layer, running straight about 40 feet north of it in one stretch. Forty feet times about 900 feet of run. That's most of an acre I'd been mowing around and calling somebody else's.
The neighbor is 78 and his father built that fence. I know him well enough to borrow a tractor from. So now I've got a marketing video that's genuinely good, the pond shot alone is worth what I paid, and a problem I created by paying somebody to look at my own land from above.
My attorney says the fence question depends on state law on adverse possession and acquiescence and that I should not be the one deciding it, which I already suspected. What I keep thinking about is that I've walked that line maybe forty times in twenty years and never once saw it, and a man with a $2,000 drone saw it in nine minutes because he was thinking about camera paths.
I paid him for the extra flight and the mapping file. Cheapest thing I've bought all year, and possibly the most expensive.