Other software solutions are created to expedite production - faster – not necessarily better. From Land Surveying, City Mapping, Land Planning, Civil Engineering, Landscape Design, Architecture, Financial Modeling, and more, there has never been a single product that empowers YOU to deliver a significant improvement in quality – until now: LandMentor.
Learn about the History of LandMentor and the revolutionary software they develop for land surveyors!
We are excited to be part of this platform to help land surveying become a more important industry and help solve many of the problems facing surveyors today. When I first began this career, many land surveyors also did earthwork, and some minor engineering, and I think surveyors, not engineers, did most of the platting design back then. Today, licensing prevents surveyors (for the most part) to roll over into engineering, but I think surveyors are better prepared than engineers to take on the neighborhood layout process, and as such we will be teaching some great methods to help surveyors gain that business. For example, in POB, nearly 20 years ago we wrote this article:
At that time, we had been at initial refinement of the process we coined 'coving', intentionally not patented or protecting it so that others (you) can financially benefit as we did. In that article we had already been designing 200 developments (to final plat accuracy) over about a 7 year period since the discovery coving's unique geometry. We claimed (conservatively) 42,000 lots designed with coving.
Today, we still plan neighborhoods, splitting software development and planning about 50 - 50 percent of our time. We are contracted on average to design about 25,000 lots a year. All of our designs are a far more evolved set of methods than mentioned in the POB article 2 decades ago, as well as our technologies.
Our firm is small, like many land surveying firms, a mom & pop family operation. I'll refer to my son Adam, who for the past 22 years has been my right hand in both planning and software development, and my wife Adrienne has been instrumental in writing Prefurbia, as well as developing seminars and classes. We recently hired a draftsman to aid in developing 3D models for our own developments, and to offer the services at reasonable prices to our LandMentor users. Otherwise, all these decades we have had nobody else in production of the designing process or delivering the final product to our customers.
Typically planners, as you read my story, are about as accruate as throwing darts at a board blindfolded. We aim to change that. Adam and I have designed 1,200+ developments in 47 States and 18 Nations, all to final plat accuracy - in all these years we have never had a single geometric error leave this office. Highly unusual for a planning firm, but in 2019 - shouldn't that be the norm?
Another great (but slightly outdated) resource is this 14 minute educational video, to demonstrate how the methods have grown since the POB article 19 years ago:
The example used in this 2 year old video was Trasona at Viera, which had just gotten preliminary plat approval at the time the video was made. Here is a drone of Trasona about 4 months ago:
Land Surveyors that learn and adopt these methods will be at the forefront of change. Those that monitor this platform will have a unique learning opportunity as we share market proven methods as well as address real problems in todays land surveying industry and at least in our opionion, how land surveyors should overcome them.
Rick Harrison
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