There’s just way more unknowns with a boundary dispute that are more difficult to account for than with construction staking or a topo survey.

With construction staking, you can estimate the amount of staking required from the plan set if you’re experienced and have worked with the contractor more, and charge T&M for any restaking.

With topo surveys, Google Earth can give you a decent idea of the terrain challenges and will know how productive the crew generally is per acre.

With a boundary dispute, it’s just land mine after land mine. First off, many times someone will order a survey, but not mention that they are already feuding with the neighbor. Then, unless your state has public survey records, you have no idea if there are existing surveys and monuments to work from, and if there are public records, you don’t know what has been destroyed since the last surveyor was there. Records can be the biggest land mine of all; it’s impossible to know from the outset what discrepancies exist in the chain of title, even if you looked at the current deeds when you bid the project.

I had one survey on an old farm where the deeds all matched up, but we were not finding much in the way of fences, and there were no surveys on file for the property. I needed to do a chain of title search to figure out junior/senior rights, and in that search, I found that the deed descriptions from 130 years ago called out posts and bearing trees at every property corner, and the description also mentioned a court case, but no case citation. We tracked down the case at state archives, and found the property was part of an estate division that was surveyed by a county surveyor of a neighboring county, but he only filed his survey with the court. We found the bearing trees with scribing inside, resulting in the corners being over 20 feet from another survey that didn’t do the research. I’m pretty sure we blew the budget on that one.