Advance Surveying & Engineering Co. provide wide variety of services. For more details on what is involved with the services listed below, please read our guide on “Choosing a Survey Type” or call us at 952-474-7964.
Marking Property Corners & Boundaries
If you can’t find your property corners, or if some of them are missing, we can re-establish them.
This type of survey may be needed if you are building a fence, remodeling your home, in a disagreement with your neighbor, or for various other reasons. We can establish only one or all of your property corners. We will use wood lath, flags, or paint to help mark your property corners in order for you to find them easily. If it is difficult to see between the property corners, we can place iron pipe along the lot lines to help locate the line between the corners we established.
No drawing is prepared for this type of survey. If a drawing is desired, please see Marking Property Boundaries and Preparing a Drawing below.
Marking Property Boundaries and Preparing a Drawing
This type of survey may be needed if you want, or a governmental agency requires, a survey drawing. 
Such a drawing can include more or less detail, depending on your needs. We can help you decide what is shown on the survey drawing to satisfy your needs or the requirements of government officials.
For more information about the different types of items you may need on your drawing, see “What kind of survey do I need?”
New Home Survey
After you have selected a lot to build a new home on, we can perform a new home survey. 
The first step is to prepare a survey drawing that will show existing conditions on the lot. If your architect or builder would like a preliminary version of the new home survey, we can send them the survey, showing existing conditions, as a base map to aid in preparing your building plans.
When your building plans complete, we can finalize your survey drawing to show your proposal to build a new home, related improvements, grading, and drainage. We then mail or email the drawing to you, so that you, your architect, your builder, and government officials can review the proposal and make any revisions or corrections. Once the proposal is reviewed and accepted we will then issue a final drawing. To view a New Home Survey example, please download this example.
Property Division / Lot Split Survey
This type of survey is needed if you want to divide your property into new lots or parcels. 
We recommend talking with your city planner to make sure a Property Division/Lot Split, using metes and bounds legal descriptions, is something the city would allow.
If a Property Division/Lot Split is allowed, we can prepare a survey drawing that will show the existing conditions on the property, your proposal to divide the property and legal descriptions for the newly created parcels.
If a Property Division/Lot Split is not allowed, you may be required to plat your property, please see Preliminary & Final Plats below.
Preliminary & Final Plats
If you are planning on dividing your property, you may need a preliminary and final plat to do so. 
A preliminary plat consists of showing the existing property, improvements on the site, and showing your proposal to divide the property.
Once a preliminary plat gains the approval of governmental agencies, we can prepare the final (record) plat in a format suitable for recording. To see an example of a Preliminary Plat, please download this example. In order to see an example of a Final Plat, please download this example.
ALTA/ACSM Land Title Survey
An ALTA/ACSM Land Title survey will show certain existing conditions, easements, and other matters affecting the property on a survey drawing. 
It will also show the results of visual inspections and research that may reveal title problems on the site. Title insurance companies require surveys prepared to specific guidelines to give insurance coverage that most lenders and careful buyers require.
These surveys are frequently required on sales and financing of commercial, industrial, and multi-residential properties. A title insurance company provides us with a title commitment that shows the legal description of the property, a list of easements, and other matters that affect the property. They guarantee the title commitment is correct and we survey the legal description they provide and show easements and other matters of record listed in the title commitment.
To learn more about ALTA/ACSM Land Title Surveys and to view the minimum standard detail requirements, please visit www.ACSM.net. To see an example of an ALTA/ACSM Land Title Survey, please download this example.
Flood Elevation Survey & FEMA Forms
You may be able to avoid paying for flood insurance that is required by a lender, if your property does not flood. 
To document this, we can prepare an Elevation Certificate on FEMA’s form that will show the base flood elevation for your property, the low floor elevation, and lowest adjacent grade elevation of your structure.
If either the low floor elevation or lowest adjacent grade elevation (when you walk around the outside of the structure, this is the lowest point you step on) is above the base flood elevation, the requirement for insurance is typically waived.
To learn more about FEMA and to view flood maps, please visit www.FEMA.gov.
Common Interest Community (CIC) Plat
If you want to create a condominium, we can prepare the site plan sheet for the Common Interest Community plat. 
We can refer you to an architect that prepares the floor plan sheets of the plat and makes the required mechanical and structural certifications. You will also need the help of an attorney experienced in the preparation of condominium declarations and bylaws.
To see an example of a CIC Site Plan, please download this example.
Topographic Survey
We can prepare a topographical map of your property to show elevations and contour lines. Topographical maps show the hills and valleys on your property by depicting contour lines separated by a vertical interval of typically 1 or 2 feet. It can also show spot elevations on man-made objects such as curbing, building floors, or retaining walls and in flat areas.
This survey is useful for understanding existing drainage patterns on the property and for planning improvements to the property.
Registered Land Survey
A RLS or Registered Land Survey is used to divide land that is Torrens property (most property is abstract and not Torrens, check you county web site to see which your property is). This process starts with a survey of the property described in a Certificate of Title. The survey drawing will show the existing boundary of the property and a proposed division of the property into lettered tracts (Tract A,B, ect.). We will prepare this type of survey in a drawing format suitable for recording at the county level. These surveys are reviewed by the County Surveyor and by the Registrar of Titles before they are allowed to be officially recorded.
Specialty Surveys
We can do specialty staking, accident reconstruction, height determination of buildings and various other specialty surveys. An example of such a survey, we did, would be determining the precise location of “goose neck” brackets that hold the cables that support the roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.
Precise Leveling
On projects where very accurate differences in elevations are needed to be determined, we use a precise electronic digital level. This equipment is capable of measuring elevation differences to a tolerance of less than one thousandth of a foot. This may be used for monitoring foundations, fill settlement, or other situations where a very precise difference in elevation needs to be measured.
Easement Description Preparation
A property owner can grant someone else the right to use part or all of their property for a specified use (driveway, utility lines, ect.). This right is established by filing a document in the county records called an easement. A real estate attorney typically prepares such a document, spelling out such matters as how long, for who, and for what purpose the easement rights exist. When the attorney needs to specify what area is covered by the easement, we provide a survey drawing that shows the location of the easement on the property. The drawing may show nearby improvements so that one can be sure those improvements lie outside the easement area and be helpful in understanding the legal description of the easement. We also provide a written legal description that your attorney can attach as an exhibit to their document.
Impervious Surface (Hardcover) Calculations
Many communities and governmental agencies have regulations that limit how much impervious surface you can have on your property. This is often expressed as a percentage of the total lot area. We prepare a survey drawing showing the boundary of the entire property and the area of the property. We then prepare a tabulation showing the number of square feet of existing impervious surfaces (house, driveway, ect.) to get a total area of “hardcover” on the site. We then compare this with the allowable hardcover determined by taking a percentage of the total site area. We can also prepare a second tabulation showing how the hardcover percentage will be affected by proposed improvements.
We recommend speaking with the governmental agency that has jurisdiction over your hardcover requirements to review and approve these tabulations. Every municipality has different definitions of what is, or what is not hardcover and sometimes judgment on the part of their staff becomes involved.