Arborist Consulting in Austin
Arborist consulting in Austin is what you buy when you need advice rather than tree work: a judgment, and the written document that carries it. It runs on two tiers. The entry engagement is a short written report with photos and plain direction. The entry-tier condition assessment is a paid engagement. Advanced reports — TRAQ risk assessments, appraisals, canopy impact assessments, mitigation plans, tree survey audits — are a paid engagement, scoped and quoted per request.
The rest of this page covers which tier your situation actually needs, and what each one does and does not get you.
Advice, or tree work? The answer decides what to ask for
Keith’s own line for it is the cleanest test there is: it is advice versus tangible services.
If you want work done — pruning, a removal, a care program — what you want is a bid, and our bids are free. If what you need is a judgment, or a document that goes to somebody who is not you, that is consulting.
The split is by what you are buying, not by who you are. A developer buying a mitigation plan is buying advice and belongs on this page. The same developer’s protection fencing is a tangible service and belongs on construction site services.
What a free bid already includes, so you know what you would be paying extra for
An estimate here is not a number on a card. Every bid comes with a property inspection, and you get two documents out of it.
The first is a written site inspection and work plan from the arborist who walked your property: a description of the work, photos of the trees, and — where it helps — a marked-up map showing which parts of the property we are working, which parts need work later, and which trees we are not touching. Plus the crew size, the time, the equipment, and the obstacles. Traffic control. Ground protection mats. Whether a permit is needed. Landscaping or pavers at risk.
The second is the priced proposal, prepared by our office manager off that work plan. Both come to you.
One thing that work plan is not: an arborist report. It is our internal scoping document, and we share it because it is genuinely useful to you. It is not written to be filed with anybody, and we are not going to imply otherwise.
So the honest version of the boundary is this. A bid is scoped to the work you asked about. A consultation is scoped to the question. When the question is should this tree come out at all, or what is wrong with it, or what do I hand the city — the person answering it should not be answering it inside a bid for pruning. Keith’s version of why:
Is he just a tree pruner? To a hammer, everything’s a nail. He’s just looking at your trees trying to figure out what he could trim.
The entry-tier report — and the two things it is not
These sit on the entry rung:
| Engagement | What you get |
|---|---|
| Residential tree condition assessment | A short written report: a general description of overall tree condition, plus photos, plus a quote for any advanced report needed |
| Real-estate site tree assessment | The same shape, for a property you are buying or selling |
| Construction-project initial on-site consultation | Varies by the phase the design is in. Typically a general description of the foreseen challenges and of general tree protection status and conditions, plus quotes for advanced reports |
That short report is written direction for you. It is the arborist’s read on what you are looking at, in writing, with photographs, so that you are not relying on your memory of a conversation in the driveway.
Two things it is not, and we would rather be blunt than have you find out later:
- It is not a formal risk assessment. That is a TRAQ report and it sits on the advanced rung.
- It is not a report meant to be submitted with a permit application.
The construction initial consultation carries the same limit: it does not include submit-ready reports.
We put it that plainly because the opposite claim is false for the entry tier. So if a report is described to you as satisfying city requirements, the question worth asking is: which report?
The ladder is built to answer that for you. The entry report ends in a quote for the advanced work — if advanced work is warranted. Sometimes it isn’t, and then you have your answer and you are done.
Advanced reports — the documentation tier
This is where the reports that go to somebody else live:
- TRAQ risk assessments
- Tree appraisals — a formal report establishing what a tree is worth. There is also a tree appraisal calculator on this site if you just want a preliminary figure
- Advanced condition assessments
- Canopy impact assessments
- Mitigation plans — where a removal has to be mitigated, the deliverable is a recommendation of what types of trees to plant, and where
- Tree survey audits
These are a paid engagement, scoped and quoted per request. What one includes depends on what the report has to do and who it is going to, which is why it gets scoped rather than listed.
Surveys, audits and inventories are three different things
Survey, audit and inventory get treated as one subject. They are three different objects, and they have three different answers to the only question that matters here — who produces it.
| Object | Who produces it |
|---|---|
| Tree survey | A state registered surveyor. We do not originate one |
| Survey audit | Us — we correct the tree measurements and the species identification on the surveyor’s drawing, and add the condition information, which is not on the drawing at all |
| Tree inventory | Us, outright. No surveyor required |
| Update | Us — the audit re-run on an aged survey |
A survey locates trees accurately and describes them approximately. The audit is what makes it usable for a tree decision. That is not a complaint about surveyors — identifying and assessing trees is simply not what a surveyor is for.
Old surveys get updated for the same reason: the three kinds of data on them decay at different rates. Positions hold. Measurements drift. Condition changes fastest — and condition is what a tree decision turns on.
Prognosis before diagnosis
Everything above is process. This is the actual thing you are hiring.
Keith’s order of operations: before he diagnoses the problem the tree has, he needs a prognosis. Does this tree even have a chance to survive long term? If not, there is no point going down the diagnostic rabbit hole.
The first question is never what is wrong with this tree. It is is this tree worth saving — and that starts with the species’ genetic ceiling, not just with what the tree looks like today.
His standing example: a hackberry is only going to live about fifty years in a best-case scenario. If it develops a severe problem at year twenty-five, there is no chance it recovers and lives another hundred years — it was never going to live a hundred years to begin with.
So sometimes the honest answer is that this tree had a fifty-year lifespan, it is at year twenty-five with a severe problem, and your money belongs in its replacement rather than its rescue.
What one visit cannot tell you
Asked what he looks at that predicts which way a damaged tree will go, Keith declined the premise, and the refusal is the position:
There’s not a silver bullet where I can walk up and tell based on the condition of the tree which treatment is gonna allow it to recover and which one has got no way to come back. I’m seeing the tree for the first time. It’s a snapshot in time. It’s too much I don’t know.
There is no five-bullet checklist for whether a tree will recover, and publishing one would be fake expertise. What actually moves the outcome is the condition of the tree, the time of year, and what the weather year is doing — the same damage assessed very early in the growing season and assessed near the end of it are two different prognoses, because what differs is how much season the tree has left to recover in.
And the corollary, from a company that sells treatments:
If a tree is marginally damaged, and it is a great weather year with favorable temperatures and good rain, it might fight the fight by itself and need no help. In the opposite circumstance where it’s droughty and hot, it may need a lot of help.
The tree is the one doing the fighting. A treatment is help offered to a fight already in progress, not a switch that decides it.
When the tree is a poor candidate and you love it anyway
This is the part of the job that is not technical. Keith’s script, and the order it comes in matters:
Every indicator says that this tree is probably going to continue falling apart. However, I am not Mother Nature’s keeper and strange things have happened. There doesn’t appear to be any harm if you want to keep the tree and see what happens. If a limb falls, it’s just gonna fall into the grass and not hurt anybody. Just temper your expectations and don’t put too much emotional baggage on the line.
Honest prognosis first, then the humility, then the risk, then expectations — and only after all of that, what could improve the odds. No urgency, no closing move.
What the first visit is for
The goal of the first visit is to establish a prognosis, set customer expectations, and propose a work plan. We’ll ultimately follow-up via email with what that plan looks like and what the cost would be. That’s the initial consultation.
Consulting on an Austin build site
Construction is where advice and field work sit closest together, so the line is worth stating.
The tree protection plan is not a separate arborist report. What Austin accepts is the tree-protection specs — fences, mulch, plywood, air-spading — drawn onto the building plans themselves. Those plans belong to the architect or the engineer.
What we sell is the audit of them. We review the existing plan set and give the design team the recommendations they need to bring it into compliance — sometimes as a redline of their drawings returned for them to update, sometimes as a small written report noting the changes needed. Either way the output goes back to the design team to incorporate. We do not issue the plan.
The same logic runs through the rest of it. Advanced condition assessments, canopy impact assessments, mitigation plans and survey audits are advice, and they live here. Protection fencing, mulching, air-spading a utility trench, deep-root fertilizing, pruning and removals are tangible services, and they live on construction site services.
Who is signing the report
Keith Brown is an ISA Board Certified Master Arborist (TX-0985B), the top ISA tier. He has been ISA-certified since 1997 and in the trade since 1993; Austin Tree Experts has been working Central Texas trees since 2003. Two more ISA Certified Arborists are on staff.
Our crews work to ANSI A300 and ANSI Z133 standards.
On insurance: we carry both general liability and workers’ compensation. The useful thing is not that we say so — this market is saturated with companies that either carry insurance or say they do — it is that you can check. Ask us for the ACORD certificate and call the carrier listed on it. Apply the same test to everyone bidding your work, including us.
What you will not get from us is a lab-first answer. Keith’s read on tree problems is built on firsthand fieldwork rather than on testing. He dropped oak wilt lab testing over false positives and false negatives, and he uses soil testing hardly at all, because one soil test is a single snapshot of a chemistry that is genuinely dynamic. His own label for that, and it stays:
This is anecdote, obviously, from a practitioner, not science from a scientist. But this is the strategy that I have found that works the best.
Ask for a consultation
Call (512) 996-9100 or request a consultation online, and describe what is actually going on — the tree, the deadline, and who if anyone is waiting on a document. That is enough for us to tell you which tier your situation needs, and whether it needs one at all.
If what you want is a price for tree work, ask for an estimate instead. Those are free and they come with the written inspection described above.
It is the smart step. Measure twice, cut once — and on tree work the cut is the part you cannot take back.
We consult on trees across Austin and the surrounding Central Texas metro — West Lake Hills, Rollingwood, Bee Cave, Lakeway, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Pflugerville, Georgetown, Dripping Springs, Buda and Kyle.
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