Can I get planning drawings online without a site visit in London?

Why old estate agent floor plans are not enough

Estate agent floor plans are drawn for marketing. They show the layout well enough for a buyer to picture the rooms, but they usually leave out wall thicknesses, they round room sizes, and many carry a note saying they are not to scale. They also show the house on the day it was sold, which may be before a later kitchen extension or a knocked-through wall.

Designing on top of one is a common reason a scheme does not fit once work starts. A steel beam sized for the wrong span, or a rear extension that turns out 200 mm deeper than drawn, costs more to fix on site than the visit costs to avoid. Old plans are still welcome: send them, because they help us plan the visit and spot what has changed.

If plans you already hold turn out to be wrong, what to do when your drawings do not match your house sets out the fix at each stage.

What you pay, and where the visit sits in it

Planning drawings start at £745 in total, and the measured survey is a £200 part of that total. There is no separate call-out charge for coming to measure, and no VAT is charged on our fees. Council application fees are paid to the council separately.

If you do not need new design work, two services involve no visit at all. CAD conversion, from £195, redraws plans you already have into an editable file and tells you where the source cannot be trusted. Location and block plans start from £19, drawn on licensed mapping rather than measured on site.

What the council expects to see on the drawings

Every application needs a location plan, and government guidance says its scale should typically be 1:1250 or 1:2500, with the application site edged clearly with a red line. That plan comes from mapping, not from a visit, which is why we can produce it remotely.

The same guidance adds that additional plans and drawings will in most cases be necessary to describe the proposed development. For a house, that means existing and proposed floor plans, elevations and often a section. Those are the drawings that rely on the house being measured, because they show what is there now and what will change.

When a measured survey is still needed, and when it may not be

You need the visit whenever new design work is drawn against the existing house: an extension, a loft, a conversion, or internal changes that move walls. Building regulations drawings come later and lean on the same survey, so it is done once per project rather than twice. If you go to building control with full plans, the government page says to expect a decision within 5 weeks, or 2 months with your consent, and those plans need the same measured base. A building notice is quicker, since work can start 2 days after it is submitted, but you do not get formal approval like you do with full plans.

The visit may not be needed if you already hold recent, accurate, scaled drawings of the house as it stands, for example from a survey for a previous project with nothing altered since. Send them to us with the quote request and we will say honestly whether they are reliable enough to draw on. If they are not, we will tell you which parts we would check and why.

Two jobs where accurate measurements matter most are lofts and building control sets; see what drawings a loft conversion needs and what drawings building control needs for an extension.

Getting started without leaving the house

Send us the address, what you want to build and any photographs or old plans through the quote form on the planning drawings page, or by WhatsApp. You get the fixed fee in writing, and the survey visit is booked at a time that suits you.

If you only want the measured survey, for example to compare designers, see our post on what a measured building survey costs. If your existing plans are good and you just need them in CAD, our CAD drawing conversion service needs no visit. Every fee is on our pricing page.