Foundation repair, concrete repair and crawl space repair in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA

The survey inside the city limits reads as urban fill rather than a natural series, which is normal for ground this built up, so for the soil series the county survey is the reading: across Orange County the USDA survey is Cieneba at about 11 percent of the survey, with Myford and Calleguas alongside it. Broken down by texture it is 42 percent clay, 7 percent silt and 14 percent sand. For swelling and shrinking, the city sample is the more specific reading. Inside the Rancho Santa Margarita city limits it gives a weighted linear extensibility of 2.62 percent, which USDA reads as low shrink swell potential. Based on NOAA 1991 to 2020 climate normals for the Laguna Beach weather station, precipitation averages 12.7 inches a year, so the soil beside a wall can be wet in one season and dry in another. What is actually happening at your address is something we confirm on site, not something we read off a map.

The typical house dates to 1992, and the single biggest block of the stock, 9,268 homes, went up in the 1990s. The 796 homes finished before 1980 are the ones where drainage was rarely engineered and backfill was rarely compacted. 21 percent of the housing here, 3,528 units, sits in buildings of five or more, so a fair share of local work is on shared structures rather than single family homes. Of the owner occupied homes, 84 percent carry a mortgage. Every evaluation ends with a written estimate that describes what we found at that house.

The city covers ZIP codes 92678, 92679, 92688, 92692. Addresses just outside those boundaries are covered too; a city limit is a mapping line, not a service boundary.