Curious for those who breakdown sections, lots of sections, how do you come up with your rate.?ÿ
For example...you are tasked to identify and breakdown 30 Sections into Quarters. Charge by acre or corner? Assume you have to research and file corner doc for everyone you touch/use. All sections are contiguous but cross into different Townships just for fun.
Inquiring minds want to know how others come up with an estimated fee? Ultimately I would do T&M, but still need a realistic ballpark number for the client.
Go...
As always depends, townships are all over the map with respect to controlling corners.
A Section breakdown can range from $500 to $50,000.
Impossible to give out a price without more information.?ÿ
However, since these sections are contiguous much of the information gathered to do one should help with the cost of the next one.?ÿ
@mightymoe Yes..Okay to clarify...Pretend the project is very rural, 100% Agricultural, most Sections are owned in their entirety or at least majority single ownership.
ummmm?ÿ?ÿ "One MILLION dollars"?ÿ?ÿ
Doesn't really help much, would still need some information concerning all the history/topography surrounding the job.
but...????????.
$3k per section could be a starting point, go up from there.?ÿ
for a rough quote: classify all the needed corners into easy access / hard access, under a recover rate, and also total up the ones that?ÿ likely need to be established.
Multiply out, and add up the per corner cost, add in the extra for the ones you need to set.
Add in your travel time.
Add in materials.
Add in office time & document prep.
Divide everything back out into your easy, or hard access corners to establish a rate so the project can easily be modified if it gets expanded.
?ÿ
I recall a discussion along these lines some time back. A price of $1 per lineal foot of exterior boundary was recommended by some. For 30 sections as square as could be that would be?ÿ $116,000.
If we figure that 30 contiguous sections, including the center of section, would be around 180 monuments that is $645 per corner. That's good for a few hours of field time and a few hours of office time for each corner. Some more, some less, of course. That feels like a reasonable rule of thumb number to me.?ÿ
I'd be pricing such a job in a more detailed manner along the lines that Toivo outlined. But I'd expect to end up somewhere within 10%-20% of $116,000.
@paden-cash Wind or Solar, take your pick! Renewables are blowing up everywhere - Folks are scared that tax break will be drying up soon...
You could walk right up to a corner and find it; hit the button on your RTK and be done in five minutes; or, you could spend 2 days searching for a corner that just isn't there.
The biggest mistake you'll make is thinking that the corner isn't there. I've heard a lot of horror stories about the crew coming in and saying they couldn't find it; then the LS going out and finding it 100 feet away from where they were looking...
Regardless of what you tell your client; do the job right.
I've heard a lot of horror stories about the crew coming in and saying they couldn't find it; then the LS going out and finding it 100 feet away from where they were looking...
Oh, the horror. I'll do much better than that. Calc'd a search location for a site in southern Oregon, 5-6 hrs drive from Portland. Crew returned claiming they didn't find anything.?ÿ I was on the site a couple months later for another reason and as I was set up in a place that the monument could be seen (about 1000' range), decided to have another go at it. Monument found within 0.08' of search calc under about 1/2" of turf. It was brass in concrete, no pin finder response. But the tip of the rod was obviously resting on something solid. I exposed it with a scuff of the boot.
Too many other less dramatic stories to tell. But I think that the most effective way for an LS to participate in the field work is during the monument search phase.?ÿ ?ÿ
wow.
Did the crew get encouragement to find new work elsewhere?Or relegated to dipping violently flowing active sanitary sewers?
Question for the Surveyors, as I am still working up that hill:?ÿ Does liability and risk factor into these decisions, and if so( im guessing is likely) how do you make the determination to avoid diminishing returns versus risk/reward in a big ol survey like this??ÿ
@jitterboogie Liability comes into play for everything we do. I try not to think about in great detail, but instead treat them (all surveys) all the same. Big surveys don't really differ from large ones. It's just the same process repeated over and over. Large section breakdown here is mostly for base map purposes, then once the project limits are truly dialed in you go "inside" the sections and look at all the individual lines that's quite often when you have to apply the "kinks", "punts" and "trims". Just CYA upfront with assumptions, do your due diligence, and accept the fact large surveys hardly ever fit together nicely and remember you can't deed stake 750 individual deeds and expect them to fit.
Neither was immediately fired. Each blamed the other. Of course it was 2 months after the events so memories could be understandably sketchy. In this case the amnesia was total.?ÿ But both decided to fall on their swords within a few months.?ÿ
I did have some sympathy for them. They weren't new guys but they really hadn't been properly trained on search techniques. To them, searching meant waving the pin finder around. No response meant no monument. On the other hand, any kind of blip pursued until every bottle cap and iron bearing field rock within a 10' radius is dug up.?ÿ The pin finder is not a magic wand. A vertical iron rod or pipe has a distinctive sort of signature sound.?ÿ Properly used you can even get a very good idea of how deep the mon is. These guys, like a great many others I had worked with, had no feel for the nuances.?ÿ The possibility the a monument would not respond to the pin finder was not even a thought.?ÿ
Thanks for the reply!
Now: "...surveys hardly ever fit together nicely and remember you can't deed stake 750 individual deeds and expect them to fit."?ÿ Don't let the GIS people with parcel fabric hear you say that.....They'll scream Heresy!
Now: "...surveys hardly ever fit together nicely and remember you can't deed stake 750 individual deeds and expect them to fit."?ÿ Don't let the GIS people with parcel fabric hear you say that.....They'll scream Heresy!
I'm sure that when the GIS people enter a bunch of metes descriptions they nearly always find that they don't fit exactly, so they have to make assumptions or compromises.
Question for the Surveyors, as I am still working up that hill:?ÿ Does liability and risk factor into these decisions, and if so( im guessing is likely) how do you make the determination to avoid diminishing returns versus risk/reward in a big ol survey like this??ÿ
Yes, liability is ALWAYS a factor in deciding and planning large jobs. And you avoid liability "pot holes" by being insured, careful...and right. 😉
The last "big" job I did requiring lots of boundaries was a 17 mile transmission line.?ÿ I located the boundaries on approx. 25 sections.?ÿ And that was just the beginning...it wasn't as simple as locating a section boundary and then "cook booking" it into quarters.?ÿ My client paid to have a boundary on every parcel from which R/W was being purchased with the preparation of R/W documents as my responsibility.?ÿ The client also had their own title company and R/W agents with which I worked closely.
The exterior boundary work and topo was a set price.?ÿ I then had an hourly rate for the "interior" boundary work on separate parcels.?ÿ I remember two sections had but one owner...another section had 37 or 38 that required attention.?ÿ The average was around 15 or 20.?ÿ And out of the entire 25 sections there wasn't a single one whose interior corners fit any sort of textbook breakdown.?ÿ Some approached "nightmare" status (as in "nobody is getting out of here without getting sued..).
The entire project took three years with multiple additional work contracts.?ÿ I purchased new GR-5s and 2 vehicles for the project.?ÿ They were pretty much worn out at the end of that 3 years...
I did made enough money on that project to finally retire.?ÿ 😎 ?ÿ
...or just absolutely plain out lie.....I worked in GIS for a while. After I had been surveying first.?ÿ Truth is stranger than fiction.?ÿ Found a few lots in the GIS that were "islands" and had no possible way to ingress/egress and therefore I couldn't create an address for them. I thought that was odd and researched more.
Discovered the senior GIS Specialist had picked the wrong corner to base their drawing upon and well, that about sums it up.?ÿ GIS = "Get it Surveyed" and "Got it Surveyed" to make sure it's correct
