Discover why your land surveyor isn't just another consultant—they're the

foundation professional who can make or break your construction project. Host

William Reid, a seasoned construction industry expert, reveals how these

"property detectives" uncover critical information about your lot

that can save you tens of thousands in construction surprises.

Learn about the six major restrictions cities use to control your

project, from Floor Area Ratio calculations to setback requirements. Reid

shares real examples of projects where assumptions about property lines led to

costly foundation relocations and explains why that fence in your backyard

probably isn't on your actual property line.

Whether you're planning new construction, a major addition, or

considering a property purchase, this episode provides essential knowledge

about when you need a survey, what they deliver, and how they integrate with

your design team. Perfect for homeowners who want to avoid expensive mistakes

and ensure their project starts on solid ground—literally.

https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-cooperative-geologic-mapping-program/science/national-geologic-map-database-0

• Free Story: The Tale of Two Homeowners
• https://the-awakened-homeowner.kit.com/09608e1727
• Watch: YouTube
• https://www.youtube.com/@TheAwakenedHomeownerv
• Listen: Podcast
• https://podcast.theawakenedhomeowner.com/listen
• Read: AMAZON , All Book Stores
• https://www.amazon.com/Awakened-Homeowner-Orchestrate-Construction-Success-ebook/dp/B0F1MDRPK7
• https://books2read.com/u/bpxj76
• Visit: Homepage
• https://www.theawakenedhomeowner.com/
• Follow: Instagram: Facebook:
• https://www.instagram.com/theawakenedhomeowner/
• https://www.facebook.com/theawakenedhomeowner/
• Contact: Email: wwreid@theawakenedhomeowner.com

Mentioned in this episode:

The Awakened Homeowner Book

The Awakened Homeowner Book

So we're back in the world of the Design series of the Awakened Homeowner Podcast, and we're going to be diving into design consultants. These are the consultants that support your architect. Usually your architect is the person who is coordinating all of the design consultants that he or she may need to design the project properly.

One of the first things that they'll want to look at is a title report that you received when you purchased the property. Or you may have to obtain a title report in order to get some of the legal declarations that have been made on your property that you may not even be aware of. This will be one of the first things that you do.

In fact, when you go to purchase a property, you may even ask, "Do you have a survey? Have you ever done a survey?" And if the owner has done a survey, it's their obligation to disclose that to you and provide that information to you. Because a survey can expose a lot of things about a property, and some of them may not be so good.

So let's talk about what a surveyor does on your property and why it's so important to you. One of the first things a surveyor does is determine where your property lines and corners are. It sounds simple, but I'm going to tell you that there have been many times in my experience where you walk out your back door, you look at the back fence, you look at the left fence, you look at the right fence, you walk along the front of your property, you see your sidewalk in front of your property, and you think that's probably the property line, and you just assume that.

As fence contractors come in, or as homeowners put up fences themselves, they just put them where the last fence was, or they move them over a foot or two. It's not uncommon for the fence line to not be your property line. So a surveyor will go out and measure the site based on the coordinates that they've researched, and they will document on the actual site and on their drawings [00:04:00] what they'll do is drive stakes—metal stakes into the corners if the metal stakes aren't already there—and determine precisely where your property corners are, which will then determine your property line.

Now, when the suburban neighborhoods were developed—when any kind of neighborhood really was developed—the original surveyor drove metal stakes likely into the ground to the corners. So you also may see a surveyor with a metal detector. Their idea is to locate the existing metal stakes and then verify if those are accurate based on the coordinates that they have. I don't want to get into the too technical aspect of this because as a homeowner, what you really care about is: where the heck are my corners? Where the heck are my property lines?

Once this becomes apparent, things can get unusual and strange where now the neighbor wants their property back, or you want your property back, and it gets scary. So this is the benchmark. This is the foundation. This is the baseline of what you need to know in order to design your project accurately.

I'm going to get into the details of why this is so important. If you're considering a new home, if you're considering a remodel or renovation where you're expanding the home, if you're in an area where you are getting close to the property lines or want to get close to your property lines with your new proposed project—this is the perfect example of knowing exactly where your property lines are.

So there are all these little things you can do as a homeowner just to figure out if they really are. Let's move into the next thing that a surveyor often does—they will establish the setbacks, especially if you ask them to. In the city or county municipal code, you have a requirement to keep your structures so many feet away from the property lines, so you can't build right up to your property lines. In some cases it's five feet, some cases it's 10 feet. Some cases it's different on one side than the other, in the front and the back.

Say your current home is five feet away from the property line and your home was built in the 1960s, and you want to add on to the back of the home, and you've just assumed that the setback is still five feet. You could get into trouble where maybe it's been changed over the last 60 or 70 years. So you need to understand where your property lines are, your property corners are, and your property setbacks. Now you've got a good foundation.

There's a term called "floor area ratio" in the world of county and building departments, and that is simply how many square feet of living area can you build relative to the square footage of the lot. In some cases it may be 50%. So if you have a 6,000 square foot lot, you can build a 3,000 square foot home. It gets more complicated than that, but that's all we're going to be talking about at this particular moment.

I am going to be talking about easements in a little bit, but if you don't know what an easement is, you may want to look that up. An easement is a particular part of your land that rights have been given to others to access your property or use your property. It could be a utility company, it could be a neighboring property, it could be a lot behind you. You may not even be aware of these easements that are on your property, and this can affect your net site area.

Another thing that a surveyor will do is they will do what's called a topographic map. This measures all of the slopes and angulations in your property to determine slope percentages and to help your architect and other design consultants such as the civil engineer—we'll talk about that in the next episode—but if you have a sloping lot, even the very slightest slope, a land surveyor, if you request a topographic map... Now, if you just request boundaries and corners, they will not do a topographic map.

This is really crucial. This is imperative to know when you're designing a home and placing a home on the lot. It's imperative to know when the structural engineer goes to design the foundation and the architect goes to design the home along with the foundation. So a topographic map is really important if you have any kind of sloping lot.

But where the height is measured from is important. I had a project in Mountain View, California, where it appeared to be a flat city lot—we'll use the 60 by 100 example for right now. The city rules can get really complicated and can be interpreted different ways.

But in this particular case, we designed an addition to a home and they had a height limitation, and the existing home was higher than the height limitation. This older home was higher than the current height limitation. So we could not design the structure to meet the existing height. To compound the problem: where do you measure the height from? Is it from the dirt right next to the house? Where is it?

Unfortunately, we had assumed—and there's that bad word again—but we had assumed that you could match the existing structure, and we had already conceptualized the whole design and had to backtrack. So understanding the height of your lot, the slope of your lot, and where to measure the height from is important, and the data that the surveyor can provide you is what you need.

Again, the land surveyor's data will provide your architect and your design team the information needed so that they can calculate the slope percentage. That is a really important one too.

You can see that we've gone through—I've already gone through in these first couple of minutes of this episode—a few things that can make or break a project if none of this stuff is done prior to you designing the project, if none of this understanding comes about on what the rules and regulations are.

Let's move on. The next one that's really important is called lot coverage and impervious coverage. You have a property and you have a house, and you have a detached garage, and maybe you have an accessory dwelling unit, or you want an accessory dwelling unit like an in-law quarters or granny home.

If you're working on an existing home and you're planning to expand or do landscaping, build onto the home and add additional accessory structures and landscaping hardscape, it's really important for you to know how much impervious coverage you have to what buildings you're planning to add. This will help you calculate to make sure that you are in compliance with these regulations.

If you're not, and you don't know these rules, again, you could very well get denied on the project.

If you don't provide some of this information, this is a good example of the basis of change order work that everybody is scared to death of. If you're doing a remodel, an addition, or if you have an existing parcel that you're planning to demolish structures on and rebuild, a survey documents, as I mentioned earlier, all of the buildings that are on the property and all of the hardscape, the pavement, the asphalt on the existing site as it sits today.

The structures, the hardscape, and knowing that you have this tool at hand, you can just point to it and say, "We're removing all these structures. We want this site clear," and it's pretty clear. It's hard to argue what we're doing once the contractor sees the site, takes his pictures, has the drawings.

If these people know where the actual entry point is, they're going to be able to calculate their trenches and all of the costs associated with getting power to the building. This is really important because if it's not known and there are assumptions that are made and things change, it's very possible they could come back to you and say, "It wasn't on your drawings, and now we see that it's another hundred feet over in the corner here."

A very common one are utility companies. It could be the overhead power lines along the back of your property. It could be the underground water main serving other parts of the neighborhood. It could be underground power and cable TV, and all kinds of things that are either under the ground or that a potential neighboring property has access to.

I've had many projects where easements have been a surprise. Before you purchase your lot or even an existing home, understanding the easements is really important. There's going to be a whole episode on easements, but here's the thing: surveyors identify the easements on their documentation, and they usually do this by researching the recorded files at the county and the city, and they review your title report, which are required to document the easements.

Turns out this was underground power that was servicing a transformer on somebody else's property to service other homes. Now, if an owner purchases a property like that and is not aware of an easement like that, this is [00:23:00] where you can get into real trouble because your expectations are blown up when you meet with your architect and say, "Hey, I want to build a home."

Now, in this particular case, we were able to work around it and it wasn't that detrimental. But it sure would have been nice if it wasn't there—it would have given us a lot more flexibility, especially since we were constrained. In this two and a half acre parcel, by the time we considered the steep hillside and we considered the easement, we were down to a one-acre parcel that we were working with, roughly speaking.

That's just one example. A surveyor will document this, and ideally you find this out before you purchase the property so that at least you know what you're doing going in. Also, be aware that easements can reduce the amount of allowable floor area or site area—net site area. It reduces the net site area, how many structures that you can have on it.

The cities control your project through six major restrictions that we've talked about already: How big can you build? The floor area ratio. How tall can you build? The height restriction. How much of the lot you can cover? How much impervious surface that you can have—sidewalks and driveways and roads. How close to the property lines can you build? Setbacks. And what areas can't you build on? Easements.

Let's move into the next segment now, and we're going to be talking about when do you think you need a land surveyor? Almost 100%, you need a land surveyor if you're building a new home, even if you're building on a 100% flat lot. It's very important that you, at very minimum, establish the corners and therefore the property lines and all four sides. Unless you have more than four sides, it's important that you understand where your property lines are.

On the front of the property, you may assume it's right here at the edge of the street, or it's the edge of the sidewalk—which sidewalk, which edge of the sidewalk? In some cases, it's not the sidewalk. In some cases the property line stops into your lot another five feet. Understanding your property lines is really important.

Now, major renovations and additions. You don't really necessarily need as much for renovations where a renovation, meaning you're not really expanding the home, you're just working on the interior of the space. But if you get into the remodel category, which means you're changing things, you're adding on, you're putting new roof lines on, you're adding onto the side of the house, the back of the house—having a survey done is really important because you need to understand how big of a home you really can build. You need to understand where your property lines are so that you know where you can stop your easements, all these kinds of things.

When you have a project that is really tight to the property lines and therefore the setbacks—so if you have a five-foot setback on each side and you want to max out, absolutely max out to obtain your goals and the largest home that you want, or whatever your goals are—having the property lines is paramount to make sure that you are protected from a liability standpoint, and we'll get into the [00:28:00] procedures with that.

Those are the ones that you really definitely want to get surveys done, and you may want to get topo. That's the teetering point there—you may not need a topographic map, which increases the cost of a survey because there's a lot more time that goes into that. That is the typical projects that you would want to use surveys for.

There are a lot of people out there that are trying to cut corners and not even really realizing they're cutting corners. They're trying to find the least expensive designers. They're trying to guide the design as much as possible to save money. There are all kinds of things that people are doing and really are cutting their own throat, per se.

If you don't hire a surveyor and you make a lot of assumptions, one of the first things that a surveyor will help you do is put the buildings on the right part of the lot. It sounds dumb, but there have been situations where foundations have had to be moved six inches after they were put in because they encroached into the setback.

Can you imagine that? After the contractor pours the whole foundation, a wall has to move over six inches—this happens. You could probably Google it and find all kinds of stories about it. Surveyors prevent that.

What they do is they come back out with their equipment—and this costs money, but saves you thousands, maybe even more—and they will certify that the forms are in the correct location. This protects the contractor, the architect, you. It protects everybody, and they will provide a letter of certification for you to put in your file if anything should occur.

Not to mention the proper design solution to achieve your expectations. Foundation efficiency is important because if you don't pay attention to the survey when you're designing, you could end up with extremely tall foundation walls in certain elements that may not have been necessary, that cost you tens of thousands—$20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 more for your foundation.

There are really no surprises during construction in this particular aspect of it. This is how we're mitigating—minimizing the surprises that happen and also legal protection. With that certification letter, with all this documentation, you're now protected. That's part of our guiding principles, if you remember: enlighten and empower and protect.

We're doing all of those things here with a survey. Those are the main things. What happens with the surveyors, once they've completed their work, they take their files and it's usually done in AutoCAD or Revit or one of these applications that your architect works with, and they provide that file to the architect.

The project I was talking to you about earlier, about the easement going through part of the property, the big hillside on the other—because we had the topographic map imported into the architectural software, in this particular case, it was Revit, our architect was able to place the lot, embed the lot, and then rotate 10 degrees, five degrees to maximize the view while also considering the foundation costs.

These are really big decisions that could save you a ton of money.

All right. Let's talk a little bit about the process when you're working with a land surveyor. Your first step—it's more likely that you've already engaged with an architect, and you'll be depending on the architect to guide you in this direction. But what I'm giving you today is information so that you can maybe ask the questions that may be relevant to your lot.

It's often that an architect is your orchestrator, bringing all the consultants into the project. If in your case, you're orchestrating it on your own and you have a separate designer and civil engineer and structural engineer, you're doing it yourself. You can do that too. It just requires more knowledge, more time on your end.

They usually have somebody they've worked with in the past and they will request proposals for you to do the survey, and usually an architect will charge a fee to manage that process in different ways, which is another episode coming up about how architects work. But they may add a percentage, they may add their time and maybe roll it into their fixed fee.

They'll send you a proposal and the first step is they will go out to the site and they will measure the site with all of their equipment. They're out there with their orange vests and all their transom, which is like a laser level, if you will, and pinpoint the coordinates of the corners.

They'll be driving stakes. They'll usually be driving wood stakes and they'll put the coordinates on there with a little orange flag or orange paint or something. If you show up after they've been there, you'll see your corners. Then that's all documented within the drawing.

Now, there's also another phase I alluded to earlier, and that's just because they've delivered a document to your architect, they don't always just disappear. They will mark the foundation for the builders. If you have a blank lot, a builder could request that the surveyor come out and mark with stakes where the foundation's going to go, where the home's going to go on the parcel.

They not only certify the setbacks, which I mentioned earlier, but they will actually help a builder place the house on the lot, especially if it's a large parcel, complicated parcel. Your surveyor doesn't disappear after they've done their work. They're involved in the process, not a lot, but enough to protect you.

That's what we're all about, right?

Some of the biggest mistakes that I've seen on projects is ordering the survey after the design's been done. I know this sounds crazy, but people do it all the time. It's either because they realized they needed it late in the process, or the city or county required it. What happens with this, the survey comes out and the reason usually it's coming about that we need it is because there are questions that have come up.

Why not spend the $3,000 or $4,000, or $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 to get a comprehensive survey and topographic map so the architect going into the project can just design it once? This also—the biggest mistakes that we see without a survey is the construction surprises. People show up to their house and see how high it's sitting out of the ground, or the elevation change from the garage to the home.

Think about it this way. The survey is first, then the design, and then the permits. Don't try to miss those three simple steps because you may end up doing the design twice, the survey next, and going to permit two or three times because you didn't have the proper documentation and design criteria to make that a smooth running process.

That is really important.

There are two things happening here. One is, are we investing money to save money? For the most part, we are. Are we investing money to meet our expectations? Most certainly we are. Are we empowering our design professionals, like our architect, to represent the design to you as best as possible? Absolutely.

Your architect's going to provide a much better quality design to you to begin with, so don't discount the data that a land surveyor provides to you and your design professionals. That's what I have for you today, and this is Bill Reid with the Awakened Homeowner. We will see you on the next episode.