Land Surveyors in Queens, NY

The Most Varied Borough to Survey

Queens contains more distinct property types than the rest of the city combined, and the survey that comes up depends entirely on which part of it you are standing in. Long Island City and Astoria are dense, increasingly commercial and increasingly tall. Central and eastern Queens - Forest Hills, Fresh Meadows, Bayside, Douglaston - is detached and semi-detached housing on regular platted lots. Then there is the Rockaway peninsula, which is a different problem again.

The Advantage Nobody Mentions

Much of Queens was laid out as subdivision in the early twentieth century, with a filed map to work from. That is a materially cleaner starting point than a Manhattan or Brooklyn parcel assembled from older deeds - lots are regular, dimensions are recorded, and the record research is a shorter exercise. Where a Queens survey does get complicated it is usually because a two-family conversion, a garage or a driveway has drifted from what the filed map shows, not because the map itself is ambiguous.

The Rockaways

The peninsula is mapped as flood zone across effectively its whole length, and the rating consequences are large enough that the elevation certificate is frequently the first document an owner there needs, ahead of anything transactional.

What Gets Ordered Here

title survey work for the enormous volume of one- and two-family closings, boundary survey where a driveway or garage is disputed, and as-built survey for the conversions and unfiled alterations that older two-family stock accumulates. Long Island City development brings ALTA/NSPS survey, topographic survey and construction stakeout in sequence on the same sites, and subdivision survey work appears on the larger eastern lots where a parcel can still be divided.

Queens Survey FAQs