New Property Onboarding Walk and Site Map
Purpose
Capture, once and with the customer standing there, everything a crew will otherwise have to guess at every week for the next five years. Almost every recurring problem on a mature account traces back to a field nobody filled in at the start: the second gate nobody knew about, the septic lids a zero-turn has been rolling over since April, the cut height three crews have each chosen differently, the irrigation mainline an aerator found the hard way. The walk produces one artifact, the site map, and the discipline that makes it work is that an unknown is written down as an unknown rather than left blank, because a blank field reads to the next crew as permission to improvise.
Scope
Covers the pre-service walk on a new maintenance account: access, no-machine and no-spray zones, turf and bed inventory, utility and irrigation location, service constraints, and the signed site map that comes out of it. Also covers re-walking an existing property after a renovation, a fence change or an ownership change.
Does not cover the first service visit or the height and pattern decisions on the day, which the weekly mowing route service standard SOP owns, pricing or the agreement, or the camera-station scoring list, which the property photo record and quality audit SOP owns; this walk only sets the stations it defines.
Roles and responsibilities
| Role | Owns | Hands off |
|---|---|---|
| Account manager | Booking the walk with the customer present and filling every field on the map | Issues the completed map to dispatch before the first service date, not after it |
| Customer | What they know about their own property: lines, wells, pets, events, sensitivities | Confirms the no-machine zones by walking to them, not by describing them at the kitchen table |
| Office | Loading the map onto the property card and flagging every unknown field | Blocks any ground-breaking service on a property with an unresolved utility unknown |
| Crew lead | Reporting anything found in service that the map does not carry | Sends the correction the same day so the map is amended rather than annotated in a truck |
The row that fails is the second. A customer who says "the septic is somewhere in the back" and is never walked out to it has told you nothing, and the crew will find it with a wheel.
Procedure
Book the walk before the first service date, with the customer physically present. Acceptance: a scheduled appointment, the customer or a household member on the property for the whole walk, and the blank map in hand. Wrong looks like a drive-by estimate turned into a service card. Stop rule: a walk the customer cannot attend is either rebooked or completed with every customer-knowledge field marked unknown, and the property is serviced front-only until it is closed out. Hazard: none, this is a booking made from a desk.
Walk the full perimeter and record every access point, not just the one you used. Acceptance: a count of openings with the lock or code for each, the pet on file with the containment agreed, the staging position and the trailer turnaround. Wrong looks like a map with one gate on it because the walk went in and out the same way. Stop rule: an opening the customer cannot open during the walk is recorded as unverified rather than available. Hazard: this is a first walk on an unknown property, so the customer brings any animal in before it starts and nobody steps into a back yard ahead of the owner.
Walk to every no-machine and no-spray zone and mark it physically. Septic tank and distribution box lids, the drain field, a well head and its casing, irrigation valve boxes, landscape lighting transformers, shallow-set pavers, a pond or koi feature, a vegetable bed, a children's play area, and any planting the customer does not want touched. Acceptance: each one walked to, marked on the map by distance and bearing from a permanent feature, and flagged on the ground where the customer allows a marker. Wrong looks like a note reading "septic in back yard", which is the size of most back yards. Stop rule: a zone the customer cannot locate is written as unknown and the whole area is treated as no-machine until it is located. Hazard: nobody stands on a septic tank or distribution box lid at any point during the walk, because an older or degraded lid can fail under a person's weight into a confined space that is immediately life-threatening; look from beside it, and if a lid is cracked, soft or displaced, tell the customer at once and keep everyone off it.
Inventory the turf and beds with numbers, not adjectives. Acceptance: turf species or mix, approximate area, the cut height range for that species from your extension guide, slopes a machine cannot safely traverse, bed linear feet and edge type, tree and shrub count with pruning exclusions, and any drainage or shade problem visible. Wrong looks like "mostly fescue, medium size", which produces a different quote and a different cut height from every person who reads it. Stop rule: a slope steep enough that a walk-behind operator would be working across the fall line is marked hand-trim or no-mow on the map rather than left to the crew to judge in the rain. Hazard: walk the slope during the survey rather than eyeing it from the flat, and do it dry, because the point is to find out where a machine slides before a machine is on it.
Set the three camera stations and the standard views. Acceptance: three standing positions, each described by a permanent landmark and a facing, covering the front approach, the main turf and the hardscape edge. Wrong looks like a station described by something that grows or moves. Stop rule: no permanent landmark at a needed view means a driven marker or a measured offset from the building corner, never a description of a shrub. Hazard: none beyond walking ground already surveyed at step 4.
Locate utilities and irrigation before any ground-breaking service is even quoted. Acceptance: the map records where the gas, electric, water, sewer, communications and irrigation lines run, with the source of each: a public locate through the 811 one-call system, a private locate, or the customer's own documentation labelled as such. Every state requires notification before digging and the required wait varies by state, so the ticket goes in against that state's rule rather than a habit; critically, 811 marks utility-owned lines only, so anything past the meter that the property owner installed, meaning irrigation mainlines, landscape lighting, a gas run to a pool heater or grill, and pet containment wire, is not marked and needs a private locator. Wrong looks like an aeration quoted from the map with the irrigation line marked from memory. Stop rule: aeration, edging to depth, staking, planting or any digging is blocked on the card until locates are on file, and a fresh public locate is pulled for the job rather than reused from the walk. Hazard: if a line is ever struck, the preventive control is only half of it: for gas, everyone leaves immediately and moves upwind, nobody touches a switch, doorbell, opener or vehicle ignition, nobody uses a phone in the area, no attempt is made to plug or crimp it, and 911 and the gas utility are called from well away; for an electrical conductor, nobody approaches within 10 ft, nobody touches water in contact with it, and the utility is called; nobody re-enters for tools in either case.
Record the service constraints that will shape the route. Acceptance: the municipality and its permitted start hour, any association or lease hours stricter than the town, a customer-specific start override with its reason, no-service windows, known event dates, and the irrigation schedule you cannot mow through. Wrong looks like a map that captures the property perfectly and none of the clock. Stop rule: a verbal constraint goes on the map in the customer's words with the date, or it does not exist. Hazard: none, a conversation at the door.
Sign the map, issue it, and mark every unknown as an unknown. Acceptance: the customer and the account manager both sign, every field carries either a value or the word unknown with what is needed to close it, the map is on the property card before the first service date, and the front-only or no-dig restrictions arising from any unknown are on the card as active restrictions rather than as notes. Wrong looks like a map with four empty boxes, which reads as nothing to report. Stop rule: a restriction created by an unknown stays live until the field is filled and someone records who filled it and when, so the gate closes where it opened. Hazard: none, this is completed at a desk, and what a signature on a site map proves about anything later is a question for your own attorney; what it gives you is a dated record of what the customer told you, which you can bank.
The record this produces
One site map per property carrying: openings with locks and codes, pet and containment, staging and turnaround, every no-machine and no-spray zone by distance and bearing from a permanent feature, turf species and area, cut height range, slope and hand-trim areas, bed footage and edge type, tree and shrub count with exclusions, three camera stations, utility and irrigation lines with the source of each, service constraints, active restrictions, both signatures and the date.
It loads onto the property card and is what the pre-shift briefing, the access protocol and the route sheet all read from, so a correction here reaches four other procedures without any of them being edited. The field that earns its place is the unknown list: a map with honest unknowns and live restrictions is more useful than one that looks complete, because it tells a crew where to stop.
Worked pass: the filled-in map for a half-acre residential account
Access: three openings, being the north side gate on a thumb latch, the south side gate on a keyed padlock with the code carded, and the rear alley gate recorded as unverified because the customer could not find the key. One medium dog, containment agreed as indoors during service.
No-machine zones: septic lids at 18 ft and 24 ft east of the rear deck post, both walked to and flagged, neither stood on. Well head 9 ft north of the garage corner. Four irrigation valve boxes along the south bed. A vegetable bed at the rear fence marked no-spray, which the herbicide SOP reads as a sensitive site.
Turf and beds: tall fescue at roughly 9,000 sq ft, carded at 3.5 in against the extension guide's range, the north bank marked hand-trim because the walk showed a walk-behind working across the fall line, 240 linear ft of bed on a cut edge, eleven shrubs with the two flanking the entry excluded from pruning.
Camera stations: the driveway apron at the mailbox facing the house, the rear deck corner facing the back fence, the side walk at the meter facing the bed line.
Step 6 fails. The customer knows where the water service enters and has the builder's plan for the sewer, but cannot say where the irrigation mainline runs, and mentions a gas line the previous owner ran to a pool heater that is no longer there. Neither is utility-owned, so the 811 ticket covering the gas service to the house will not mark either. Stop rule taken: both are recorded as unknown with private locate required, aeration and overseed are blocked on the card, and the fall aeration the customer asked about is quoted as contingent on a private locate rather than scheduled. Mowing, trimming, edging and bed work are unaffected and start on time.
Constraints: municipal weekday start 07:00, weekend 09:00, no association. Customer override to 08:00 on weekdays because of a night-shift neighbor, recorded in the customer's words with the walk date.
Close-out: two signatures, two unknowns written as unknowns, two live restrictions, being no-dig and the unverified alley gate, and the map on the card six days before the first visit. Eleven days later the private locator marks the irrigation mainline and the abandoned gas run, the map is amended, the no-dig restriction is lifted with the date and the name of whoever lifted it, and aeration is scheduled.
References
- The 811 one-call system and your state's excavation notification statute, which sets the required notice period and what the locate covers; utility-owned lines only, so private lines past the meter need a private locator
- Your state land grant extension turfgrass guide, for the species cut height range recorded at step 4
- See related: the LawnCare property access, gate and pet protocol SOP, the property photo record and quality audit SOP, the route sequencing and daily close-out SOP, and the weekly mowing route service standard SOP, all of which read this map