Topographic Surveys in Albany, CA

Albany's survey math is unforgiving in a quiet way. The city is a compact grid of small, flat lots with modest bungalows, and its setbacks leave little room for error — an addition or ADU design often turns on inches between the proposed wall and the property line, or between an eave and the neighbor's fence. On lots this small, a topographic survey doubles as a complete existing-conditions map: house corners, eave overhangs, fences, walks, driveway grades, and the neighboring structures that constrain what can be built. Flat ground adds its own problem, because with minimal relief the drainage design depends on subtle grade breaks that sparse shots simply miss. The exception to Albany's flatness is Albany Hill, whose steep wooded slopes present the opposite challenge — real contours, real slope calculations, and vegetation that blocks conventional line-of-sight work.

Our Trimble laser scanner handles both conditions with the same workflow. One site visit captures millions of points: on a flat Ramona Avenue-scale lot that means every crown, swale, and back-pitched walk is measured rather than interpolated, and every structure edge relevant to a setback question is in the dataset at survey-grade accuracy. On Albany Hill parcels we filter vegetation from the cloud to deliver a bare-earth model of slopes a rod crew would struggle to walk. Either way, when your designer needs a dimension we did not anticipate — the height of a neighbor's window sill, the grade at a fence post — it is already in the point cloud, and no return trip is needed. Deliverables include spot elevations, 1-foot contours, a DTM, and a layered DWG/DXF base map.

Albany record research and survey filings go through the Alameda County Recorder and Alameda County Surveyor. Where a setback question needs the property line itself resolved, our combined boundary + topographic site plan surveys answer both in one mobilization.