Land Surveyor in San Rafael

San Rafael is Marin's county seat, which makes it the place every Marin survey ultimately passes through: the Marin County Surveyor reviews Records of Survey and Corner Records, and the County Recorder files them. The city itself splits into very different survey settings. Downtown and the Canal neighborhood sit on low, flat ground near the bay, where FEMA flood zones and sea-level-rise planning make accurate NAVD88 elevations the first question on any permit. The hillsides — San Rafael Hill, Dominican, Sun Valley, Terra Linda, and the ridges above Lucas Valley Road — are steep, wooded, and subdivided in irregular lots where retaining walls, shared driveways, and access easements have accumulated for a century. San Rafael's hillside development rules apply extra scrutiny to slopes and grading, so hillside projects need a topographic survey with reliable contours before design starts.

Our terrestrial laser scanner suits both settings. On a hillside lot it captures the whole slope, every wall face, and the tree canopy in one visit, and we extract a ground model, contours, and a DWG base map from the cloud. Downtown, the same instrument documents older commercial buildings — the Fourth Street storefronts, mixed-use and office buildings being repositioned — as registered point clouds, scan-to-CAD floor plans and elevations, and BIM-ready models. Boundary surveys anywhere in the city are tied to found monuments and county records and, where required, filed as a Record of Survey with Marin County.