Immediate Application Rejection

Councils routinely reject applications submitted without correctly scaled and positioned existing drawings.

The "Domino Effect" of Wasted Materials

Inaccurate survey data causes compounding errors on-site. A small measurement discrepancy can gradually scale into major structural misalignments, forcing you to waste materials, inflate your budget, or cut corners to rectify the issue.

Forced Rebuilds and Amendments 

Poor positioning data can be catastrophic. We have witnessed cases where incorrect site levels required roofs to be completely redesigned, or newly built structures had to be demolished because drawn plans misrepresented boundary limits.

Failing Building Regulations 

Even with planning approval, construction must meet strict building regulations. Incorrect survey data often means the final construction fails to comply with space, height, or access requirements.

This provides an exact, GPS-positioned map of all land features, levels, and physical boundaries of the site, alongside the access to it, empowering your designers to optimise ground excavation and avoid guesswork.

Without a topographical survey, your designers will be left guessing or using basic data such as Google Maps or Ordinance Survey plans to plan the design of the site, which usually creates mass amounts of wasted materials, potential and cost. 

A few metres gained could be the difference of an extra house or two on a plot. Missing these opportunities could be costly!

This allows you to know the types, runs and depths of services that run through your site area. Without it, you might be planning to build right on top of a public sewer, may require extra spend to get your waste to the exact levels, or may not realise that you have no access to certain live services, which can cost a small fortune that may not have been allowed for in your budget. 

Once the planning is complete, a utility survey is essential for construction teams to know exactly where it is safe to break ground so that they don’t accidentally hit a live cable or strike a water main, posing risk of life and extreme unforeseen repair costs!

Utilising highly accurate 3D laser scanners, this captures floor plans, elevations, sections, and roof plans, along with any other elements required by the designers to replan the affected space, or maybe even an entire refurbishment or change of use. 

Planning authorities require exact existing elevations to compare against your proposals. If things don’t look quite right, planning authorities can force you to make changes to the construction or design to suit, so getting these right is essential!

For inaccessible areas or large developments, drone surveys capture accurate level and positioning data quickly.

For larger developments, drone surveys can be deployed to help with feasibility studies, as we can capture accurate level and positioning information from them, making establishing boundary extents and potential flood risk areas really easy to identify at extremely low costs when compared to ground level surveys.

This is a method of reverse engineering the existing site & building information into a 3D model. These surveys allow all things captured within them to be easily added to an asset register to help quantify demolition, materials and labour costs for construction. 

Planning authorities still require drawn plans to be orthogonal, which doesn’t truly represent what may actually be visible in reality. So, for example, a roof or part of a building may at first glance appear intrusive, but by placing a virtual camera in the virtual proposal, designers can help prove privacy or design concerns to help applications get approved!

While not strictly for planning, we consider these as an essential part of any survey.

They allow design teams to virtually visit the site or building without actually doing so, saving travel costs and emissions. They also allow teams to share the online tours from anywhere, speeding up key decisions.

They can also serve as a dilapidation or condition report as it accurately captures whatever is visible at the time of survey!

Long-Term Asset Value

The survey data becomes a permanent asset to the property. If stored safely with building documents, it provides immense value to future owners or tenants, saving them time and inflated costs down the line.

1. Define your budget

Surveys can generally be scaled to meet any budget, but be sure you allow enough to meet the minimum requirements to suit the cause. We are happy to help you determine this if needed with a simple pre-project meeting, to help walk you through the following steps.

2. Accurately establish the area you need surveying

For example, if you are planning a new-build house, you don’t need the entire neighbourhood surveying, but the actual site and its access for visibility splays are likely to be important.

Or, if you are adding a single storey extension to one end of a large building, you will likely only need the ground floor surveying and in the immediate vicinity of the extension, along with any rooms or elevations that might be affected.

This step alone could reduce the survey costs by huge factors!

3. Determine the services you need

Depending on your project, you’ll likely need a combination of various survey types to meet the need. It’s always more cost effective to commission these together from one company, as it reduces the communication and resources needed.

For example, for a simple extension, commissioning the measured building survey alongside the topographical and GPR utility surveys can save a lot of costs, as multi-skilled surveyors can be utilised to make best use of resources in one visit to the property, rather than making several visits as and when you realise you need more information.

5. Consider disruption

If the property is a live site, having surveyors needing full and free access is going to cause a problem.

Consider choosing times of the day that will cause less disruption, even if this is through the night or at the weekend.

This will affect the cost but can be key to maintaining a building’s operation.

6. Request a proposal

Once all of the above is complete, request a proposal from us defining each of the things above. If you need help, don’t be afraid to call or email us again at this point and we can help and advise wherever needed.

7. Make sure you're happy with everything

Now that you have our proposal, please read through the specifications and be sure that they meet your requirements.

Run through it with your designer and please feel free to get us on a call so that we can explain anything needed to whoever is involved to ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to expectations.

This is essential, as this step is often skipped. If this step is skipped, additional visits may be required, potentially running up future costs.

What Happens Next

Scheduling & Surveying 

Accept the proposal and arrange the survey period. Our project managers will then establish the time for when we expect to deliver the final information.

For larger projects, we can drip feed the information to keep your design teams moving, and in some cases we can even work alongside them on live projects, feeding them info as it’s collected and drawn!