Real estate explainer
Measure the Land
Across most of the country, land is described by the rectangular survey: a township six miles square holds 36 sections of one square mile, 640 acres each, and each section is cut into halves and quarters. Click a section, then keep clicking to cut it down, and read the legal description and its acres. Below, measure a city lot by its shape and price it by the square foot, the acre or the front foot.
Click a section in the township, then click inside the large section to cut it into the quarter or half you want. The section list and the cut buttons do the same from the keyboard.
The description
Build a description
Measure a lot
In a spreadsheet
What to notice
The sections snake. Section 1 is in the northeast corner. The top row runs 1 to 6 from east to west, the next row 7 to 12 back to the east, and so on, so Section 36 ends in the southeast corner.
Read a description backward to find the land (start with the section and work toward the first words), but multiply in any order to find the acres: 640 times each fraction. The word “and” starts a new parcel; “of” cuts the one before it.
Why it works
A section is one mile, 5,280 feet, on a side: 5,280 × 5,280 = 27,878,400 square feet, and 27,878,400 ÷ 43,560 = 640 acres. Every quarter keeps a quarter of the area, every half a half, so acres = 640 × each fraction.
A lot’s area comes from its shape: rectangle front × depth, triangle ½ × base × height, trapezoid ½ × (front + back) × depth. Split an odd shape into these and add. A front foot is a foot of frontage along the street, whatever the depth.
“Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” Proverbs 22:28
Try it
- Build the NE¼ of the SW¼ of Section 12. Where is Section 12 in the township, and how many acres is it?
- Which section lies directly south of Section 1? Directly east of Section 18?
- Farm, Sec. 9: why is the answer 120 acres and not 80 × 40?
- Trapezoid: find 30,000 square feet by hand. What is the price per front foot?
- How deep must a lot with 100 feet of frontage be to hold exactly one acre?
Sections are drawn as perfect one-mile squares. Real townships are adjusted for the curve of the earth along their north and west edges, so some sections there hold more or less than 640 acres, and a survey, not this page, settles a boundary. No outside code, images or trackers.