Land Surveying in Cumming, GA

In Cumming, the Deed Room Is on the Same Square as City Hall

Cumming lies entirely in Forsyth County and is the county seat, which makes the recording question the shortest of any city on this list. Deeds, plats, liens and cancellations go to the Clerk of Superior Court's real estate office at 101 East Courthouse Square, Room 1007, on the courthouse square downtown. Cumming City Hall sits at 100 Main Street, a short walk from the same square. In most of the towns this firm works in, the recording office is a drive. Here it is a block.

Parcel and assessment records come from a different office and a different database. The Forsyth County Board of Assessors publishes them at qpublic.net/ga/forsyth. That is where an owner finds the parcel number, the assessor's acreage and the deed book reference the county is working from. It is a starting point for a boundary survey rather than a replacement for one, because the assessor's line work is a mapping product and not a retracement.

Inside the city limits, the City of Cumming Department of Planning and Zoning reviews and approves development plans, issues land disturbance and construction permits, inspects trade work in all phases and issues certificates of occupancy. The city seats a Planning and Zoning Board and publishes its agendas and minutes. It also publishes a zoning map and a city boundary map, both updated in October 2025, which is worth checking before assuming a given parcel is inside the city at all.

Outside the city limits the rules are different and, right now, tighter. The Forsyth County Department of Planning and Community Development, at 2435 Freedom Parkway, Suite 1400, administers the county's Unified Development Code. The Board of Commissioners has a moratorium in place on accepting sketch plat and land disturbance permit applications for property in the residential and specialty zoning districts that was zoned before April 13, 2017. On May 21, 2026 the board extended that moratorium through November 17, 2026. A separate residential rezoning moratorium was extended on April 28, 2026 through October 25, 2026, with exceptions for new applications to the RES1, MRD and MCD districts. A division that would have moved forward two years ago may not be accepted today.

Growth is why so much of this is in flux. The 2020 Census counted 7,318 residents on 7.19 square miles of land. The Census Bureau's 2024 estimate is 10,175, an increase of roughly thirty-nine percent in four years, which in a county seat comes from annexation as much as from construction. Annexation moves a jurisdiction line. It does not move a property line, and the two are not the same thing.

Forsyth County publishes zoning applications, approved plans and permits through a Customer Self-Service Portal searchable by address or parcel number, plus a GIS viewer where clicking a parcel returns its property information. Between that portal and the assessor's qPublic pages, an owner can assemble a reasonable record picture of a parcel before a surveyor sets foot on it. What neither one can do is tell you where the corner is.

For flood work, Cumming is National Flood Insurance Program community 130236. Bart Sims is the licensed Georgia land surveyor at S&S Land Surveying and the only person who signs and seals its plats.