Condo Conversions in San Rafael, CA

San Rafael keeps its condominium provisions in Title 15 of the municipal code, Chapter 15.12, which includes Section 15.12.080 on the conversion of residential rental units to condominiums. Whatever the local process requires of a particular building, every conversion is also a subdivision under the Subdivision Map Act, which means a tentative map, a final or parcel map, and a condominium plan. The city's own subdivision submittal requirements set the survey bar plainly: the tentative map must be prepared by a registered civil engineer or licensed surveyor and carry the preparer's name, business address, and telephone number, and the submittal includes a recently prepared preliminary title report and a geotechnical soils report.

The condominium plan is where the survey turns three-dimensional. Unit boundaries in California condominiums are usually airspace, defined by interior surfaces and by elevations, which means the plan needs measured floor and ceiling heights, not nominal ones. It also has to sort out what is common area, what is exclusive-use common area, and what belongs to a unit: decks and balconies, garage stalls and tandem spaces, storage rooms, patios, and stairwells. In San Rafael's conversion candidates, mostly mid-century apartment buildings around the Canal, Montecito, and the downtown edge, those elements were built before anyone imagined selling them individually, and the drawings that exist rarely reflect the walls that stand.

Our Trimble laser scanner resolves this efficiently. One pass through the building captures every unit, corridor, garage bay, and deck as measured geometry, and unit areas, ceiling elevations, and boundary surfaces come out of the cloud rather than out of a tape-and-clipboard exercise repeated per unit. Deliverables are the tentative map, the final or parcel map for recording with the Marin County Recorder, a condominium plan drawn to match the building as built, and the point cloud and scan-to-CAD floor plans for marketing and design use. See our San Rafael as-built surveys, and parcel map vs tract map in California for which map your project needs.