Optimize Your Planning with HVAC Proposal Software iPad for Planning

Hvac proposal software ipad for Planning

floor plans have become a popular add-on with real estate photographers and there's a lot to choose from nowadays i've though narrowed in on a few there's one in particular that has a free option it's what i recommend and in this episode i'm going to show why for those who don't know me my name is nathan cool i'm a professional real estate photographer in southern california i've shot literally thousands of homes and i'm a big proponent on doing add-ons to help attract and retain clients so stuff like video and websites and virtual tours all that stuff is great and when a new add-on becomes popular i like to be able to offer that especially something like floor plans because it really is a low impact add-on that you can have and you don't have to worry about your client then calling somebody else to fill in and potentially losing the entire gig to some other outfit to do it so it has become though a popular thing out there with also builders and designers jhgtv type of group because floor plans can get very complex but for most real estate offerings they really don't need a whole lot but they do need something that's good that's accurate that's also fast and fast turnaround so i'm going to show some comparison of a few but this video is really about one in particular it has this free option it's cuba casa i have a link to that by the way in the description for this video so you can download it it's a completely free version now that you can get at that link and it isn't just some trial basis it actually is free it does have a few limitations i'm going to cover that in this video as well first i'm going to show the results using cuba casa especially in problem areas i'm then going to show how their service works so you can get a better understanding of some of the pros and cons will peel back the curtain a little bit i'll briefly then show how cuba casa is used so you can get a feel for this compared to other floor plan services i'll then compare cubica though to other services that i've considered for floor plans as well as some of those pricing options now there are a few negative marks that i'd give cuba casa i want to be able to cover those things that you should be aware of nothing that stopped me from going forward with it but want to make you aware of it especially if there's something special that you will be doing with it and also preparation into the field with just a few things i'll then show how you can work cuba casa or other floor plan services into your pricing packages as well now as you may know from other reviews that i've done on my channel i won't review a product unless i would actually recommend it i've turned down products and services from other companies not just because that they might not have really stood the test of the review itself but because i just wouldn't use them cubicasa is one that i do use so i do recommend it and i don't mind reviewing it here on this channel but i also don't give fluffed up all positive reviews no matter what now just because someone has paid me to do a review they've given me some free gear credits whatnot they're not going to get just some advertisement for their product i'm going to review it from top to bottom that's what i'm going to be doing in this episode with that said be aware that cuba casa did sponsor this particular episode but i'm going to review it from top to bottom warts and all they're aware of it and they know that i'm going to be doing that so without further ado let's dive into this review let's first take a look at the results which are actually quite impressive sure these are just 2d drawings but i was impressed by the accuracy this is a scan that i did here in my house because it's got some very problem areas i want to dive into for instance let's take a look at some of this i've got over here you can see the spiral staircase you can see this is floor two on the right this is the first floor over here on the left if we zoom in there we can see that that spiral staircase that's a bit of a toughie to be able to show up on an automated floor plan so i thought that was pretty good just by scanning it without having to do any special measurement it also was able to then see that we've got this open to below area from the second floor so over here the living room has a real high ceiling it's about 18 foot ceiling just in this section you can see that it noticed that it was open to below as i was doing the scan walking across the upstairs now bear in mind also that my house is fully furnished closets are filled and when we take a look at the closets i was very impressed look at the walk-in closet here in the master bathroom picked it up no problem that thing is full of stuff and it even picked up here this is my office this bedroom up here the walk-in closet here it showed up with no problem either and there's no way you could even see the floor boards in there it is so filled but it was able to detect enough of the space to figure that out also picked up our tiny little laundry room that we have out here that goes out to the garage but what was really impressive and what really blew me away was the garage and like most garages our garage is quite messy it's filled with a lot of stuff all my photography stuff that i'm laying around with tubes of backdrop paper and light stands and whatnot but it picked it up as i was able to move through with our cars in it and everything else and it even knew where the hot water heater was it saw all the various cabinets that were in there it saw that there were two garage doors a double bay and a single bay so i was really impressed with that so it really didn't take much i didn't have to try to measure it just using the app and out there for just a few seconds it picked it up and did an accurate job with it next let's take a high level view of how cuba casa works by pulling back the curtain a little bit it'll help us shed some light on why we have some of its pros and cons the way their service works starts with their app on a phone or tablet like an iphone ipad or android device that's going to be your thin client this leaves the bulk of the processing to the cuba casa server cloud using that thin client app on your phone or tablet you then just slowly walk around to scan the interior outline of a property their app gathers dimensional information that is then sent to the cuba costa servers where ai and machine vision algorithms create what's known as a point cloud that interprets dimensions that are used to render a 2d floor plan so that gives you your dimensions within a space a qa engineer at cuba casa then inspects the floor plan that was generated by the ai makes adjustments if needed and then you're just notified once the floor plan is ready for download because of this thin client approach with a qa step there is no real time floor plan generated there has to be some human intervention near the end of the process instead you get floor plans delivered in about 24 hours but there is also a six hour turnaround option which comes as at an extra cost as well this thin client model makes for low impact on your device but it also relies heavily on the cubicosa servers even for logging in which can be an issue in the field i'm going to touch on that again later let's show how this is actually used now let's actually dive into the app itself so usability wise the cuba casa app is simple it's intuitive they got a bunch of video tutorials on how to use it so i'm not going to cover all that here i'm just going to cover the highlights here but first be aware of just a couple things since this is a thin client you need to have an internet connection to log in you don't need an internet connection to scan but you do need it to start the app scans can be sent later but this can be a problem if you're using cuba casa on a phone it's probably no big deal as long as you have reception that way you can use the cell service to make the connection but if you use an ipad that is wi-fi only not using a cellular plan then you might be in a tough position here because if you're not in a spot where you can have wi-fi then and you're not logged in you're stuck that means you'd have to log in before leaving the house to go to a gig if you're going to be using an ipad that does not have a cellular plan so one thing to think about is if you're going to go the ipad route is to think about also having it on your phone the cubica app on your phone just in case you get stuck it's something i'm going to be reporting back to cupicasa on to see if this can be a feature that they can override when it comes to making a floor plan the steps are very simple i'm going to be showing some examples here but basically before you start just turn on all the lights open all the blinds that enough light is available for the app open all your interior doors to make sure you can scan as fast as possible and as simple as possible kind of knowing your route through there that way you don't have to all of a sudden you stop you have to back up you have to open up an interior door just open all the interior doors and then you just start walking around once again don't worry about the clutter we're not taking photos we're just scanning the interior outline then you just walk slowly around the baseboards with your device phone or ipad tilted about 45 degrees down from about chest height from about five to ten feet away from the walls and small rooms that means you're just going to be turning in a circle basically try to include the bottom of windows if you can those will then be included in the floor plan and also by the way there is a speech recognition feature in their app that allows you to say a room name to define it that way that will be used as the label in the floor plan you can define it yourself instead of them trying to make an assumption on what that would be when scanning fixed furniture which is sinks bathtub stove cabinets all that type of stuff after scanning the space you can tilt up a bit to show the top and bottom of those cabinets and whatnot encounters so they are included in the floor plan as well once again cuba costa has some great tutorials on their website to show how that's done if you enter a small or a tight space just step in and then back out and continue scanning the app is intelligent enough to pick up where it left off to fill those blank areas don't be spinning around though move in move out it keeps then that same type of dimensional information there in the app so you just move over and then scan back through it when you encounter furniture that's blocking a wall you might panic don't worry you just scan over it there's usually enough baseboard around there just tilt-ups go right over top that furniture in some cases you though you might have to back out and then scan the other side of the room you're in a tight space once again don't be spinning around just move in move out try to get the baseboards as much as you can the app can prompt you along the way if it's having some difficulty but the app's intelligence does a really good job at figuring all that out then when you're finally done just stop recording and then you can send the scan to cupicasa from the app talking about some of the competitors some of the ones that i've looked at in comparison iguide was number one i know a lot of photographers that use iguide for doing virtual tours it's a great system and it makes a floor plan but once again their biggest concentration is on making those virtual tours those 3d tours also there's some added costs that go along with using iguide you do need to have their plan x core and you can see here that without using a ricoh theta on it sixteen hundred bucks and if it comes with the ricoh theta then it is twenty seven hundred dollars after that the cost it's about twenty nine dollars for a virtual tour and floor plan but that cost is only up to fourteen hundred and fifty square feet so when you start adding the other price on it to get up that's about two cents per square foot after that so uh 2500 square foot homes gonna cost you about fifty dollars a five thousand square foot home is going to cost you 100 magic plan was another one that i looked at that i really really liked it's quite an impressive app for the right client but it's not necessarily the best option for real estate listings the thing is the cost is very low it's only ten dollars a month for unlimited floor plans it's a very attractive price and it is very feature rich and it can even do 3d floor plans but it is difficult to scan an entire house this is meant more for contractors and builders scanning my house took well over an hour compared to using cubicasa which was i think maybe 15 minutes for my whole house with me not being a cuba casa expert but yeah it was well over an hour using just magic plan the results though are pretty neat and they've got you can see here an app that will do top to bottom you scan up you scan down it automatically detects windows top and bottom and that way you can make an entire 3d plan so you can make a complete dollhouse effect with their stuff which is pretty cool it's too complicated for a lot of the real estate buyers that just want to see a floor plan but if you were to be doing these type of floor plans for a designer for a builder you wanted to expand your offerings magic plan offers us for a very low price and yeah there are 2d floor plans that you can do but you have to piece each room together yourself kind of build it where cubacasa just puts the whole thing together mataport of course is the age-old standard been around forever they provide that dollhouse type of view some 3d plans but its core competency is virtual tours and that costs about 70 dollars per month for a pro account and then floor plans are an added cost about 13 more for each plan so as you go through the different plans there are different type of like schematic floor plans 13 lower plans about 20 but you're still paying extra to get some of these floor plans on these different packages so it's really not their core competency it's not really what they do they're concentrated more on doing virtual tours so the uh the floor plan that comes with it is an add-on but that's just the opposite for my next one that i want to look at and that's cloud pano so you know i use cloud pano for my virtual tours it's my recommendation i find it to be easy enough to use it's very accessible the prices are great i just pay a yearly fee on that but they besides doing virtual tours they also offer floor plans they've got a floor plan option so if you click on that you can order a floor plan so it's not a floor plan maker but you can get a 2d image of a floor plan for 25 dollars 3d one for 70 dollars in a dollhouse for 54. now this is per floor so if you were to do a two-story house like mine that would be 50. for that 2d floor plan but there's nothing that you have to do there's nothing that you have to do extra once you do your virtual tour they just make the floor plan for you and then you can tie it in but that's not the option that i would recommend they they do offer this that's great but i would just recommend doing your own floor plan and then there's an option up here to upload your own floor plan and so with that you would just select the floor plan and then you start marking the areas that then make jumps to your various scenes that you already have in there so you can use cubacasa to make your 2d floor plan upload that image and then use that within your tour that you're making on cloud pano so you get basically the best of both worlds as far as cuba costa's pricing once again it's free you can see right here zero dollars zero dollars per scan and that's with the no fixed furniture that means that you don't have things like the sinks and the bathtubs and all that fancier stuff you see down here fixed furniture is another 15 so comes with the 24 hour delivery you can get six hour turnaround by adding ten dollars to it so not bad at least you can start working with it now it might fit for a lot of what you're doing anyways that you need it is up to five thousand square feet they do have some added cost once you get beyond that but other than that there's it's really kind of a no-brainer at the zero dollars that's one reason why i'm recommending it so that you don't have there's no investment to get started in using cuba casa download it start using it you can scan your house do whatever take it on some some gigs see how it goes see how your clients like it and then kind of take it from there not everything's perfect about cuba casa and there are some negative marks that i would like to mention now none of this has stopped me from using the app these are things though to be very much aware of where then it fits in with what you can provide for your various floor plan offerings the first and i've mentioned this earlier is that there are no real-time floor plans you do have to wait 24 hours or pay ten dollars to get a six hour turnaround this is also the case by the way with other thin client services like iguide and matterport there's no instantaneous stuff there so in a lot of ways i got matterport are on equal ground with cuba casa when it comes to the real-time floor plan option and since cuba casa is a thin client if there are ever any server cloud problems then it would prevent you from logging in to use the app or sending scans to cuba casa remember you need to be logged in to start using the app you can send the scans later but you need to have some type of access to cuba casa to be able to be logged in another thing there are no 3d or doll house floor plans with cuba casa for my clients that's not a big deal they a lot of them find those 3d dollhouse plans just annoying on a phone which for real estate listings that's more what you're going to be finding the users using so the 2d is more than enough the other thing though like i mentioned about being a thin client you have to log in with an internet connection so if you ever forget to log in before you head out to a gig using a non-cellular connected device like some ipads then you're stuck so to be on the safe side it'd be good to cubicasa on your phone so you can use that in case you were going to use an ipad but didn't log in first on pricing when working this into your offerings your add-on offerings well there's a lot you can do with it one you can just include this as bundles the time is very low to make it since it's free you can be very competitive also consider the upsell options for fixed furniture so you could have different pricing tiers for your floor plans to show that you have fixed furniture you have it with just the standard simple floor plan you could then price it ingly on that and also be able to offer the faster turnaround option too when you're offering these upsell options you should be doubling or tripling the price of what it costs you with that vendor in other words cuba casa so if you're going to have that fixed furniture then think about adding 30 maybe 45 on top of it faster turnaround being a 10 option thing about 20 or 30 dollars so you have a low priced package and you have some higher priced ones and the options always there you provide the services and then of course if you really need to up your game and you're going to be working with designers or whatnot it's more than just a floor plan for a real estate listing then take a look at using something like magic plan or whatnot but you're going to be charging a lot more and that's going to be based on probably a per room basis and how much work and effort you would have to put into it when it comes it comes to cuba casa it's pretty simple with just starting out right now to see how much time it takes you what your competitive market's using and you could probably come a lot lower since this could have cost you nothing to do a simple 2d floor plan without the fixed furniture and then starting add-ons with the fixed furniture and the faster turnaround