Condo Conversions in Emeryville, CA

Emeryville’s conversion story is different from its neighbors’. Instead of Victorians split into flats, the candidates here are former industrial buildings remade as live-work lofts and dense mixed-use infill on compact parcels. Converting a loft building held as rentals or a TIC into condominiums requires a subdivision map under the Subdivision Map Act — typically a tract map, since loft buildings usually exceed four units — and a condominium plan under the Davis-Stirling Act. Loft buildings make the plan genuinely three-dimensional: double-height volumes, mezzanines, exposed structure, and units that interlock vertically in ways a flat floor plan cannot describe. Mixed-use buildings add commercial condominium units with their own boundary definitions alongside the residential airspace.

This is the building type where terrestrial laser scanning is not a luxury but the only sensible measurement method. Our Trimble scanner captures an entire loft building — every unit volume, mezzanine edge, stair, corridor, and the exterior envelope — in one visit, as millions of survey-grade points. From that point cloud we model true ceiling heights, slab elevations, and wall positions, so the condominium plan’s vertical unit boundaries are measured rather than estimated. In a converted factory where columns are out of grid and slabs slope toward old floor drains, that difference is what keeps the recorded plan from contradicting the physical building. The same scan supports as-built surveys deliverables for the architect and the HOA.

Emeryville sits on filled bay mudflats in a mapped liquefaction zone, and its redevelopment-era parcels often carry complicated title histories from industrial consolidation — both reasons the boundary survey underlying the map deserves care. Maps are reviewed by the Alameda County Surveyor’s office and recorded, with the condominium plan, at the Alameda County Recorder. As always, cities regulate conversions differently: confirming Emeryville’s current requirements for converting existing units is step one before the mapping work begins.