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Basics and Uses for Subdivision Plats

subdivision plats

When you deal with residential or commercial land surveying, you’re almost certain to be exposed to the term “plats” or “subdivision plats.” Meant to combine the words land and plot subdivision plats refer to maps of a given city, town or any smaller portion of land that’s been divided into the various property lots for that area.

At Diamond Land Surveying, we deal with subdivision plats regularly when it comes to our property and boundary surveying services. They’re some of the most basic guides available for simple information regarding basic properties, including the data we need to accurately survey your plot of land. Let’s go over the various elements that will be included on a subdivision plat, and why each piece is important.

subdivision plats

Dimensions

The first and simplest thing a subdivision plat will list is the basic dimensions of the lots in the area that’s being covered. This area will usually be a village or smaller town size, though this can vary depending on several factors. Each lot will be labeled with specific bearings and distances for measurement – these allow our surveyors to get the basic outline of the lot and define its size and specific location in the area.

Building Lines

Subdivision plats don’t only include the land itself – they also include basic building line setbacks and side yards as part of their standard information. These are both written and visualized in most cases, and are determined in advance by planning and zoning groups.

Easements

In addition, subdivision plats will contain information on easements. They will list all of the utility companies present for this area, even if they’re only involved in one small portion of the designated mapped space or even just a single property. From here, plats will also list rights of easement use on any lots located even partially within the subdivision or town.

On top of this, subdivision plats state the width and location of the easements on each lot. In some cases, these will be previously existing easements already in place from previous planning and zoning. In most, though, they will have been newly set by planning and zoning.

Street Info and Right of Way

And finally, subdivision plats will contain all the information we might need on surrounding streets and locations for the area. They will state legal street names as defined by the city or municipality, plus things like street width and location. This will make referencing larger areas within the plat much simpler.

In most cases, record plats for a subdivision are the baseline for surveying. They can be obtained through any local Recorder of Deeds office at your county courthouse – we’re happy to go through yours with you and explain what it tells you about your property and surrounding properties alike.

For more on subdivision plats, or to learn about any of our land surveying services, speak to the pros at Diamond Land Surveying today.

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Topographical Surveys and Contour Lines

topographical surveys

If you’re a home or landowner dealing with things like run-off issues, building on hills or recent elevation changes, a highly valuable tool for you is the topographical survey. This survey gives you a high quantity of information about the land you’re on and various sloping and elevation concerns, allowing you to broadly assess any issues in front of you with adequate information on hand.

At Diamond Land Surveying, our topographical survey services are second to none. We can help with these and other land surveying services throughout Utah, which has a broad range of elevations and slopes to track.

Maybe the most common question we get from land owners who are new to the topographical survey: How is the data we collect expressed visually later on? The answer is in the form of contour lines, which use very basic visual themes to identify peaks and valleys in land. Let’s go over all the basics you need to know about contour lines.

3D on 2D Surfaces

The goal of contour lines in a topographical survey is to represent a three-dimensional image using only two actual dimensions, such as on a piece of paper. To accomplish this, contour lines are drawn up to be closer together or further apart based on the peaks and valleys of the property. Someone reading a diagram of this data only needs to track the proximity of contour lines to each other to understand how steep or flat a given area of the property is.

In our next few sections, we’ll go over some of the basic delineations that are drawn from contour lines on a topographical report.

Gentle Slope Contour

For gentle slopes or even completely flat surfaces on your property, contour lines will appear further and further apart. Many wide contour lines allow for other important property areas to pass through them, such as roadways or pathways. For areas that are virtually completely flat, there will generally be no contour lines at all in those sections of the report.

Steep Slope Contour

As slopes on the property become steeper and steeper, contour lines get closer together. Extremely steep hills, including those approaching 90 degrees, will have contour lines almost touching each other. As hills even out, then, they will add a bit more spacing between each line.

Hill Contour

When mapping out specific hills, topographical surveys will use circle rings for the top of the hill – the highest point in a given area. As the base of the hill is larger than its peak, the contour swill spread out as you move out further and further.

For more information on topographical surveys and how to read and interpret them, or to learn about any of our land surveying services, speak to the pros at Diamond Land Surveying today.