Parcel Maps in Lafayette, CA

Lafayette's hillside neighborhoods hold some of the best split candidates in Lamorinda: deep, wooded parcels along creek corridors where the original home sits near the street and an acre of oak-studded slope runs behind it. The classic vehicle is a flag lot — a rear parcel served by a driveway strip — created through a parcel map under the Subdivision Map Act for four or fewer lots. But Lafayette regulates hillside and ridgeline development closely, and its residential design review process is among the more rigorous in Contra Costa County. A tentative parcel map here must demonstrate a buildable envelope that respects ridgeline development rules, slope thresholds, and tree preservation, and hillside applications on the Orinda Formation — the same weak siltstone that creeps throughout these hills — should expect geotechnical review. So we begin with feasibility: zoning minimum lot area and average width, the flag-strip access standards, ridgeline and creek setbacks along Lafayette Creek and Las Trampas Creek, and a frank read on whether the rear land can carry a house.

The sequence is tentative map through the City of Lafayette, conditions of approval, then a final parcel map reviewed by the Contra Costa County Surveyor and recorded with the Contra Costa County Recorder. Alongside splits, we handle the quieter work: lot line adjustments where decades of hillside creep have walked fences off deed lines, and mergers where an owner wants two substandard lots combined into one clean parcel. SB 9 offers a second route to a two-lot split in some cases, though its hazard-zone exclusions and Lafayette's objective standards mean eligibility deserves verification before it anchors anyone's plans. Where original monuments are disturbed, we preserve the record per B&P Code §8771.

Wooded parcels are where our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner outworks conventional methods. Under Lafayette's canopy we capture boundary evidence, ground surface, tree trunks, and creek banks in one mobilization — a survey-grade point cloud that supports the tentative map, the geotechnical report, and design review exhibits without repeat site visits, and that documents individual protected trees at their true positions.