As technology evolves, drones and other similar means are becoming more and more popular for due diligence in real estate transactions. They’re being utilized for surveys, property inspections, and the like.
One of the situations we’ve encountered in our history of underwriting title insurance is the use of an airplane to create a survey for a pipeline. The pipeline was roughly 76 miles long, and the cost for the surveyor to actually go out and survey the entirety of the pipeline would have been over a million dollars. Instead of having to pay such a large sum, they were able to fly a plane over the pipeline and take aerial pictures of the land. Then they were able to use those aerial pictures as the basis for the survey and place the different documents (the easements, monuments, etc.) over the top of those aerial pictures in order to create a type of survey for the property
That process was accepted by an insurance underwriter for providing survey coverage, deleting the survey exception to the title policy, and also providing survey-related endorsements (such as the same as survey endorsement, access, and so on).
Now with drones being used those types of things are going to be seen more and more often for survey use of property inspections. I don’t see any prohibition against the use of those items in order to establish the boundary.