Not_A-Professional t1_jd7vfg0 wrote on March 22, 2023 at 1:56 PM

Reply to comment by MandBoy in LPT: If you're buying a house still under construction, photograph everything before the sheetrock goes up. Knowing exactly where the pipes, wires, and ducts are may prove invaluable some day, and even if you never use them the next owner will appreciate it. by Needleroozer

I'm not aware of any businesses that offer it for small residential real estate, but the technology for point clouds is 100% ready to handle stuff like this.

Even with a nicely upper middle class home, the square footage should be low enough to run scans in just a few hours. I'm not a construction guy or handyman, so this just guesswork on my part, but I'd imagine your tolerance are pretty loose, too, which would bring down the time and cost considerably

Assuming they own the equipment, and aren't renting, a local company could easily scan, register, and export a point cloud for 5-10k, maybe less. Maybe set up a nice recurring payment to host the point cloud on a cloud for you in perpetuity, and get some cash on the back end too.

I understand that's not exactly cheap to the average person, but in the scope of purchasing a house it's not a huge additional expense either. I know real estate varies a ton by area, but in the places I've lived, any halfway decent home, even in awful neighborhood seems to pushing half a million, so if you're in an area where you can get a house for like 150k, I understand you might not agree, and that's reasonable

Not_A-Professional t1_jd7wspp wrote on March 22, 2023 at 2:05 PM

Oh, I do know they have really cheap (relatively speaking) hand held scanners that realtors will use to create online tours, so that could probably be done a lot cheaper. From what I've seen though, they're not nearly as good as the nicer scanners.

Haven't actually worked with them myself, but with what I can remember, rather than actually producing a fully three dimensional digital copy of the site, they produce... More like a set of flat images, that it tries to stretch and add depth to, which causes weird distortions, and you can really only look from set stations, rather than being able to view things from any angle or position in a fully 3d environment

I could be wrong, not my area of expertise, that's just what I half remember from seeing a handful of examples a year or two ago