What the site looked like in March.
Dated, measured capture at agreed milestones — foundation, framing, pre-drywall, substantial completion. Each one archived, each one comparable to the last.
What it is used for
- Draw requests and lender reporting
- Owner and investor updates
- Schedule disputes
- Warranty defense, particularly the pre-drywall milestone
- The moment eighteen months later when someone asks a question nobody wrote down
Why a committed schedule is cheaper
Booked as a program rather than as individual visits, repeat captures are priced 25% below one-off rates. We are already routed to the site and the file structure already exists.
Repeat milestone visits 25% below one-off rates on a committed schedule. Aerial progress from $350 per visit.
How many milestones is typical?
Three to four: foundation, framing, pre-drywall and substantial completion. Pre-drywall is the one with the highest downstream value.
Can you do aerials on the same visit?
Yes — construction progress aerials run $350 per visit on a committed schedule.
Do you work around active trades?
Routinely. Empty is faster and produces cleaner output, but we do not need the site cleared.
This is evidence, not a photo album
Progress documentation earns its cost in exactly one situation: a dispute, months or years later, about what the condition was on a given date. Pay applications, delay claims, defect origin, warranty scope, subcontractor back-charges. In every one of those the question is the same — what did it look like, and can you prove it.
A superintendent with a phone produces hundreds of images with no spatial relationship to each other, no reliable location, and no way to find the one that matters. A measured capture produces a walkthrough where any point in the building is one click away, on a known date, with dimensions attached.
The three visits that pay for themselves
Before the slab
Underground plumbing, conduit, sleeves and embeds. Once concrete is placed this information exists nowhere except in someone's memory, and the first core drill is when that becomes a problem.
Before drywall
The single highest-value visit. Framing, rough MEP, blocking, fire-stopping, in-wall structure. Covered in depth here.
Before the ceiling closes
Above-ceiling MEP, hangers, dampers, valves and access requirements. The plenum is the second place where things disappear permanently.
Cadence
Monthly capture is common on long commercial builds and produces a clean timeline. Milestone capture — the three above plus substantial completion — costs far less and catches most of the value. We generally recommend milestone capture unless there is a specific reason to want a continuous record, such as an active claim or a phased occupancy.
Retention and chain of custody
Every capture carries the date it was taken. Files are delivered to you and are yours — there is no subscription that has to keep being paid for the record to keep existing, which matters when the dispute arrives in year six and the platform you were renting has changed hands twice. Why that distinction is worth caring about.
We retain a working copy for twelve months as a courtesy. After that, the copy you hold is the copy that exists, so it belongs in the same archive as the contract documents rather than on somebody's laptop.
What does a single progress visit cost?
Priced off floor area like any other capture, with no minimum beyond the base. A 20,000 ft² shell is roughly $9,800 for a full measured capture, and priced off the same published schedule as any other capture. Recurring visits on the same building carry the volume discount.
Can you work around an active site?
Yes. Capture is tripod-based, takes no power and needs no exclusion zone. We work in PPE, sign in through your process, and schedule around the trades rather than asking anybody to stop.
Is this admissible?
That is a question for your counsel, not for us. What we can tell you is what we control: dated capture, stated measurement tolerance, unaltered files, and a person who can testify to how the capture was taken. More on the forensic side here.
Phoenix metro. Anywhere within 35 miles of Gilbert — Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Glendale, Peoria, Queen Creek and the rest of the Valley — carries no mobilization charge. Outside that, travel is quoted from the published zone table, and we work nationally.