Condo Conversions in Rodeo, CA

Rodeo's housing stock is mostly older cottages on the 1890s downtown grid and postwar tracts behind it — not a place with a condo-conversion pipeline, and we won't suggest it is. The realistic cases here are small ones: a duplex on the old grid whose owner wants to sell the units separately, or two parties who co-own a property and want their interests defined as condominium units rather than an undivided fraction. Both are subdivisions under the Subdivision Map Act, which means a parcel map for four or fewer units, and both require a condominium plan under the Davis-Stirling Common Interest Development Act that fixes unit boundaries, common area, and exclusive-use areas in recordable form. Because Rodeo is unincorporated, the whole path runs through Contra Costa County — planning approval at the county, map check by the County Surveyor, recording at the County Recorder in Martinez — rather than through a city hall.

The technical challenges in Rodeo are age and ground. Buildings on the 1890s grid predate any reliable drawings, so the three-dimensional unit boundaries a condominium plan must describe have to come from measurement, not from paper. Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner captures a building inside and out in one visit — millions of survey-grade points — and we draft the plan directly from that point cloud, so recorded walls, floors, and ceiling planes match the structure as built, settled floors and out-of-square walls included. Near the San Pablo Bay waterfront margins, parcels can also fall within state Seismic Hazards Mapping Act liquefaction zones, which affects the reports a conversion application may need; the survey itself establishes accurate elevations to support that work. Original grid-era corners, where they survive, are protected by Business and Professions Code §8771 and get referenced before any disturbance.

We keep the scope honest and the deliverables tight: boundary resolution, parcel map, condominium plan, and as-built documentation, all coordinated with county staff in Martinez.