Campuses & commercial
with the details that matter.
Offices, hospitals, data centers, terminals, and mixed-use. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Occupied buildings mean night work, phased access, and coordination with facilities. The upside is that one scan supports renovation design, capital planning, and space management at the same time.
Every facility has a different risk surface. We start with access, geometry density, and the decision the capture needs to unlock — then choose between laser scanning, drone mapping, or both.
Talk through a scope- Offices
- Hospitals
- Data centers
- Terminals
- Parking
- Mixed-use
Capturing an occupied building or campus
Large commercial buildings are captured floor by floor, but the sequence that matters is vertical: the core, the risers, and the plant that serves every level. Get those wrong and the floor plates are just pretty pictures that do not connect to anything.
Core, columns, and slab edge
Core walls, column positions, slab edge, window head and sill heights, and floor-to-floor dimensions. In older towers these vary between levels far more than anyone expects, which is why a single typical floor plan is a poor basis for a design across twenty of them.
Risers, shafts, and stairs
Riser closets, electrical and telecom rooms, duct shafts, stair enclosures, and elevator lobbies. A new mechanical system is limited by the shaft it has to travel in, and shaft dimensions are the geometry least likely to appear correctly on a base building drawing.
Ceiling plenum on the floors in play
Duct mains, sprinkler, cable tray, structure, and the actual available depth between finished ceiling and structure above. Tenant fit-out coordination happens almost entirely in this zone, and its depth is rarely uniform across a floor plate.
Central plant and penthouse
Chillers, boilers, air handling units, pumps, and the space around them that a replacement unit has to move through. Equipment replacement in an occupied building is a route problem first and a mechanical problem second.
Façade, roof, and the site around it
Curtain wall or masonry geometry, roof plant, parapets and drainage, plus parking structures, plazas, and campus circulation. Aerial capture covers the roof and site without anyone needing to reach a parapet edge.
Freight elevators, tenants, and night windows
The building engineer sets the schedule. Freight elevator windows, loading dock times, certificates of insurance, and after-hours HVAC all have to be lined up before a crew arrives, and in a multi-tenant building each occupied floor needs its own notification and often its own escort. Work on tenant floors is generally done at night or at a weekend simply because that is when the space is empty enough to see.
Occupancy is the real cost driver in commercial capture. Furniture, filing, and stored material block sightlines at exactly the height where a floor plan needs walls, and a densely occupied floor takes noticeably more setups than a vacant one. Where a floor is between tenants, capturing it while it is stripped is dramatically more efficient and produces a much better base for the next fit-out — so a demolition window is worth using rather than waiting for the design to start.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
Leasing, design, and facilities want different things
One capture normally serves three groups with different needs, and the deliverable set should say so explicitly. Buying a full model when the leasing team needed measured plans is the classic commercial overspend.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Leasing, area verification, or subdivision | Measured floor plans with verified dimensions | A measured plan is what an area calculation gets run against, and it settles demising options without a second visit. |
| Tenant fit-out or floor renovation | Point cloud plus a Revit model of the floor and plenum | Ceiling coordination is where fit-outs go wrong, and it needs modeled duct, structure, and sprinkler. |
| Central plant or equipment replacement | Dense cloud plus a dimensioned route and clearance study | The unit has to physically travel from the street to the plant room, through every door and corner on the way. |
| Portfolio and facilities records | Registered cloud plus as-built plans per building | One consistent record across a campus is worth more than a better record of one building nobody compares. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
What surprises commercial teams
- Assuming a typical floor — Slab edges shift, cores change above and below mechanical levels, and floor-to-floor dimensions vary through a building's history. Designing twenty floors from one measured floor is a decision to discover the differences during construction instead of during design.
- Older buildings are not plumb — Long-span and pre-war structures move, settle, and were built to tolerances nobody would accept now. Millwork, glazing, and demountable partitions are the trades that find this out, usually after fabrication, unless the survey reports the real geometry rather than an idealized one.
- Above-ceiling access denied on the day — Tenant floors frequently mean a ceiling that cannot be opened without notice and permission. Agreeing in advance which tiles can be lifted, and on which floors, is the difference between a plenum survey and a set of assumptions.
- Leaving the garage and plaza out — Parking structure clearances, ramp slopes, and plaza levels govern access, loading, and accessibility routes. They sit outside the leasable area, so they get dropped from scopes and then turn up as a constraint at the worst moment.
What owners and property teams ask
Can you scan an occupied office floor?
Yes, though it is slower and the result has more shadows behind furniture and stored material. Where the decision allows it, capturing between tenants — while a floor is stripped — takes less time, costs less, and produces a substantially better base for the next fit-out. If the floor must stay occupied, night and weekend work is the normal arrangement.
Will this give us rentable area for a lease?
It gives you a measured plan with verified dimensions, which is what an area calculation is performed against. The calculation itself follows whichever measurement standard your lease references, and applying that standard is a decision your leasing or measurement professional makes rather than an output of the scan.
How do you handle a multi-tenant building?
Floor by floor, with notification, escorts, and access windows arranged per tenant through the building engineer. In practice the sequencing conversation takes longer than the capture, so the schedule is built backwards from which floors can be entered on which nights.
Can one capture cover a whole campus?
Yes, and there is real value in doing it that way, because a single control network means every building shares one coordinate system. Aerial mapping ties the site, roofs, and parking together, terrestrial capture handles interiors, and the result is one base that campus planning can keep using rather than a shelf of unrelated surveys.
Pair TLS interiors with drone exteriors for one coordinate story.
Roof, yard, tanks, structures, and the building envelope can live in the same project handoff when the control is planned upfront.
See existing conditionsMake the invisible
measurable.
Tell us what is inside, outside, and on the line. We will help you scope the capture and the handoff — in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
Request a scan quote