Let’s say you’re thinking of extending out your rear kitchen and family room about 8’ to 10’. You’re not sure if you can go back that far because the rear fence is only about 20’ away. You’ve already done your zoning research at the City and found out that your rear setback is 13’ in from your property line, but you’re not 100% sure that the fence is your rear property line. The best way to find the answer without hiring a surveyor is to get your parcel map from the San Diego County Assessor.
An assessor parcel map is a map on record with the County. It shows all the dimensions of every street and every lot, easement, alley, etc. Probably the main reason you’d want to have your Assessor parcel map is so you can better establish your property lines and setbacks. Sure, you can assume the fences are approximate, but if you don’t want to guess and don’t want to hire a surveyor, then paying a couple bucks on the County website might be worth it. Other than that, it’s just nice to have on hand in a soft copy form. You never know when it could come in handy and you don’t want to go digging through your family filing cabinet whenever you need it. So here’s a step-by-step guide to finding and downloading your parcel map from the County of San Diego website.
- Step 1) Get your Assessor Parcel Number (APN): If you don’t know your APN like you know your Social Security number, then you’re just like everyone else. Again, if you don’t want to go digging through your filing cabinet to find your deed that will have your APN, then there are a couple other ways to get it. You can call your County Assessor and ask for it over the phone. Or, you can usually go here: www.zillow.com. Zillow.com is a pretty popular real estate site. Type in your address and do a quick search. When you’re listing pops up, you should see a couple sections, “Facts” and “Features”. Just under that, there should be a “more” link.
Click that link and up will pop some additional information that contains your parcel #.
- Step 2) Doing a search for your parcel map: If your information wasn’t on Zillow then you can still try to do this search with only your address. It’s just more accurate when searching by APN. To search for your parcel map, go to the County of San Diego website. Then under the main menu, go to the “I Want To…” link and then find the “Parcel Map” link.
Then up will pop the parcel map search page, where you can search for your parcel map by either APN or address. 
If searching by address, try typing in only the street number and street name, but not that “road, street, st., ave. drive, etc.” This tends to return no results.
- Step 3) Selecting your map: If your parcel map search returned only one map then go ahead and select it, add it to the shopping cart, and continue on to checkout. If you received two or three results back from your search, that just means that particular Assessor map has multiple sheets. You just have to find which one is yours. To find the correct sheet, you can preview the individual sheets by clicking the preview button to the right. It can be a very small preview window that opens so it may be a little difficult to establish which sheet has your lot.
It helps to have a Google map of your property open at this time so you can try to compare the shapes of the streets and cul-de-sacs around your property. Once you find the right sheet, you can select it and add it to your shopping cart.
- Step 4) Purchase, download and open your map: At the time of this article, the price is $2.61 for the map. Once you’re finished paying for your parcel map, you’ll be directed to a page that has a link to download your map and save it to your computer.
That’s it! If you have any questions or need help understanding or reading your map, please shoot us an email or give us a call.
