ADUs & Additions in Mission Viejo

City of Mission Viejo Community Development Department, Building Services Division. Permits and inspections are handled by Building Services within the Community Development Department, reachable through the building services desk, with all permits and inspections now processed online through the city's Client Self Service portal for applications, plan submittal, fee payment and inspection scheduling.

The Building Safety function is responsible for inspecting construction against approved plans and applicable ordinances. Many Mission Viejo tracts have homeowners associations with architectural review, so we confirm whether a parcel is in one and what its design guidelines require before finalizing a layout.

We prepare the drawings, make the submittal and handle plan-check corrections ourselves, so you are not the one chasing plan check.

Suburban tract pads, generally flat at the house with a graded slope at one or more property lines. Rear yards are moderate in size and almost always enclosed by block wall. One local condition that shapes the work: Most tracts were built between the 1970s and 1990s on hilly terrain, so we confirm pad fill depth from the grading or geotechnical record before committing a shell elevation or footing depth.

All of it, including Canyon Crest, Painted Trails, Casta del Sol and Deerfield. Our crews run every job out of our Cahuenga Pass base in Los Angeles, with our own people on site.

Detached ADU: generally $150,000 to $400,000+ across Southern California. What moves it is square footage, finish level, utility runs, and site access; garage conversions typically run well below a ground-up detached build. We give line-item pricing after seeing the site rather than quoting a number over the phone.

Plan a realistic year. Design and engineering typically take one to three months, city plan check and corrections add several more, and construction usually runs four to eight months depending on size and site access.

Usually yes, and often substantially, because the foundation, walls and roof already exist. The trade-offs are that you lose the garage, and older slabs and framing sometimes need upgrading to meet current code.

California ADU law is designed to allow long-term rental, and an ADU is one of the few ways to add rentable square footage to a single-family lot. Short-term rental rules vary by city, so confirm your local ordinance before counting on that income.

Yes. Plans, engineering, Title 24 and the city submittal are all handled in-house, including responding to plan-check corrections. That is a service we sell on its own, so it is not something we hand off.