Virtual site survey

A virtual site survey that does not need an appointment

Search the phrase and you get wireless surveys and companies offering a video call. Every one of those still wants a slot in the calendar with both of you on camera at the same time. This is the other kind. She scans the room when she has ten minutes, you read it when you have five.

Start with two free scans

Two scans free. No card. Nothing for her to install.

What page one means by virtual site survey

The phrase is doing two unrelated jobs on page one and neither of them is remodeling. About half the results are wireless and RFID site surveys, which is network engineers predicting coverage across a warehouse floor. TamoGraph has a Wikipedia entry for it. ClearStream RFID has a feature page. Kinettix explains the three types of wireless survey and when to use each.

The other half are service companies describing an offer of their own. A hygiene equipment supplier, a street furniture maker, an air conditioning firm, a couple of cleaning and thermal contractors, a water well company. Most of them British, and all of them saying roughly the same sentence: instead of sending someone out, we will do it with you over a video call.

Nothing on that page is written for a remodeling contractor in the States, and nothing on it stops to ask whether the video call is the right shape for the thing. So this page does both.

A video call is still a booking

Work out what a video call survey actually costs you. You agree a time. She agrees a time. One of you moves it. On the day she walks the house with the phone held out while you squint at a shaky picture trying to decide whether that is a stud wall. You ask her to hold still. You ask her to go back. You write numbers on a pad that she is reading off a tape you cannot see.

At the end you have saved the drive, which is real money, and kept everything else. The scheduling, the people who do not show, the fact that it only happens when you are both free, and the measurements still being whatever she said they were. For an outdoor condenser unit that is a fair trade. For a bathroom it is not much of one.

The thing worth getting rid of was never the drive on its own. It was the appointment.

What an unattended survey looks like

You send a link

A text or an email goes out when the lead comes in, usually before you have put the phone down. No app store, no account, no password to set. It opens in whatever browser is already on her phone.

She does it when it suits her

Nine at night with the kids in bed, if that is when she has ten minutes. You are not there and you do not need to be. On a recent iPhone Pro the LiDAR sensor measures the room as she walks it. On any other phone she photographs it one shot at a time, the photos upload as she takes them rather than all in a lump at the end, and she types in the room sizes.

You read it when it suits you

A vision model reads those photographs and a model writes the scope brief out of what it sees. Renders come from an image model so she can see what she is being quoted for. The scope is then priced against your cost book. You open the whole thing with your coffee and decide whether the job is worth your morning.

What comes back, and what it is good for

A scope brief written from what is actually visible in the photographs, the room dimensions, the photographs themselves, renders of the finished work, and a quote priced line by line off your own cost book with every quantity showing where it came from.

What it is for, roughly in order of what it is worth to you: deciding whether to drive out at all, getting a number in front of her the same day, and having the scope written down instead of carried in your head until you get back to the office. The first one is the big one. Two visits in three come to nothing, and this is how you find out which third you are in before you spend the fuel.

What it is not for: a permit set, a drawing for a designer, a structural opinion, or anything that genuinely needs your eyes and your hand on the wall. Those still need you there. The point of surveying first is that you only go when they do.

Three things a survey has to produce

Numbers you would price off

A dimension she read off a tape measure over a video call is not one of those. A LiDAR scan is. Photographs plus sizes she typed in sit somewhere in between, and the quote should tell you plainly which of the two you are holding.

A scope you can argue with

A survey that comes back as a general impression is not a survey. You want the lines written out, so when she asks why the tiling costs what it costs you can point at the square footage and at your own rate.

No slot in anybody's calendar

If it needs the two of you free at the same moment, it has not removed the hard part of a site visit. It has moved the hard part indoors and put it on a screen.

Where the number comes from

This matters more than the rest of the page. A model reads the room and writes the scope. The price is not written by a model. It is arithmetic against the cost book you loaded, with your labor rates, your material prices and your markup, and every quantity traceable back to where it came from.

Every tool in this niche says AI estimating. Almost none of them will tell you whose prices made the number. If you have been pricing work for fifteen years you already know what your own labor costs, and a national average is not an improvement on knowing. It is a substitute for it.

Which is also why the survey is honest about its own limits. Where the measuring was a LiDAR scan, the quote says so. Where it was a figure she typed in herself, the quote says that too, and you can treat it the way you would treat a measurement read out to you down the phone.

2Surveys free to start with, and no card asked for

$79Solo, one user, 20 surveys a month

$0What a job one of your own people captures on site costs against your plan

Questions contractors ask

Is this a video call?

No. There is no call and no appointment anywhere in it. She scans the room on her own whenever she has ten minutes, and you read the result whenever you next sit down.

What if she will not do it?

Some will not, and that is useful information on its own. A homeowner who will not spend five minutes on her own bathroom was not likely to be worth an hour of your truck. Send the link, leave it a day, and if nothing comes back you have lost one text message.

Does her phone have to be new?

A recent iPhone Pro has the LiDAR sensor and measures the room properly. Every other phone falls back to photographs plus the room sizes she types in. Both of those work, and you are told which one you got.

Does she download an app?

No. The link opens in the browser that is already on her phone. No app, no account, no password.

Can I still go out afterwards?

That is the idea. Survey first, then drive out to the jobs the survey says are worth driving to, and turn up already knowing the dimensions and the scope.

Does it connect to my CRM?

Through Zapier, which covers most of what people are running. There is no deeper integration than that and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise.