ALTA/NSPS Surveys in Mill Valley, CA

Mill Valley is a small commercial market with outsized title complexity. The properties that trade are downtown mixed-use around Lytton Square, offices and retail along Miller Avenue and East Blithedale, small apartment buildings on the canyon slopes, and commercial parcels toward Tam Junction. What complicates them is the town's origin: an 1890s land auction laid streets and lots across redwood canyons on paper, and much of that paper was never built. The result is a network of unimproved paper streets, public stairways linking one road to the next, and trail easements and recorded driveway or roadway easements that the city itself deducts from effective lot area. A century of decks, carports, retaining walls, and parking has drifted into all of them.

Our ALTA work reflects that. Record research covers the preliminary title report and every plotted exception, prior Records of Survey, the original subdivision maps, and Corner Records held by the Marin County Surveyor, with deeds and easements from the Marin County Recorder in San Rafael. In the field, boundary resolution is genuine retracement: original monuments are often buried, displaced by slope movement, or gone, so the boundary is rebuilt from surviving evidence and reconciled with the record. Table A items are chosen to the deal, commonly flood zone determination, gross land area, zoning setback plotting, exterior improvements, substantial features, parking, utility evidence, adjoiners, and offsite easements serving the property.

Encroachment findings here are the norm rather than the exception, so precision matters: we quantify each one with dimensions and area so counsel can weigh an endorsement, an easement, or a correction. Our laser scanner captures walls, stairs, decks, driveways, and building corners across steep and vegetated ground in one pass, which keeps review-cycle questions from becoming another mobilization. Deliverables are the signed and sealed survey with certification, a layered DWG, and written comments on each title exception. See our complete guide to ALTA surveys and Mill Valley monument preservation.