ALTA/NSPS Surveys in Brentwood, CA

Brentwood's commercial survey work splits into two streams. The first is the retail growth that has followed the rooftops: new and recently built centers, pads, and commercial sites changing hands or refinancing, each requiring an ALTA/NSPS Land Title Survey to the 2021 Minimum Standard Detail Requirements with reciprocal easements, shared access, and pad boundaries shown exactly. The second — and often the more demanding — is the acquisition of agricultural land for development. Brentwood grew up on orchards and row crops, much of it held by families for generations, and those parcels frequently carry older metes-and-bounds descriptions that have never been retraced by a modern survey.

Ag-land ALTAs here are easement-heavy, and irrigation is the reason. Farmland on Brentwood's east-county plain is threaded with irrigation district conveyance easements, canal and pipeline rights-of-way, and drainage instruments — some recorded, some evidenced only by decades of use — along with private access lanes shared between family parcels. An ALTA/NSPS survey resolves the metes-and-bounds boundary on the ground, plots every recorded exception from the title commitment, and documents the physical evidence of unrecorded use that the standards require us to show, such as roads, ditches, and utility crossings observed in the process of the survey. When the acquisition moves toward entitlement, the Subdivision Map Act governs how that acreage is divided, and our boundary resolution carries straight into the parcel or subdivision map. All record research runs through the Contra Costa County Recorder and County Surveyor in Martinez.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner serves both streams from a single mobilization. On a retail center it captures buildings, parking fields, and adjoiner improvements for Table A measurement from the point cloud; on acquisition acreage it documents structures, canals, standpipes, and fence lines that may become boundary or easement evidence. Either way, the cloud remains reusable after closing — for tenant improvements on the retail side, or site planning on the development side.