What's in it for you
If you price acquisitions or developments off permitted plans, you are pricing off numbers that are wrong by 8 to 14 percent more often than you would like to know. This is how one of the country's largest real estate groups is getting the true size of a building from its blueprint before the deal is signed, and what that does to the economics of a deal that everyone else is still reading off the permit.
The Client
One of the largest real estate and development groups in the country, evaluating a steady flow of buildings and projects where the permitted plan is the starting point for every feasibility calculation.
The Challenge
A building permit comes with plans. The plans come with measurements. The measurements are frequently wrong.
- Measured against the actual building, permitted plans were off by 8 to 14 percent of true size, in both directions
- Every downstream number inherited the error: buildable area, unit yield, sale value, construction cost, the price the group was willing to pay
- The gap was large enough to turn a marginal deal into a very good one, or a good deal into a loss, and nobody knew which until much later
- Re-measuring by hand for every candidate was slow, expensive and inconsistent, so it was done only when someone was already suspicious
What We Are Building
At TippingPoint, we are turning a suspicion the group already had into a number it gets on every deal.
- Quantified the error first. Before building anything, we compared permitted plans against actual sizes across real cases. The 8 to 14 percent range came from that work, and it is what made the tool worth building.
- Put AI on the blueprint. The tool reads the plan, establishes its true scale, and recomputes the areas independently of the figures printed on it. Every measurement points back to the drawing it came from.
- Reported the gap, not just the size. The output is the difference between what the permit claims and what the plan actually contains, in square metres and in money, so the deal team sees the exposure immediately.
- Made it routine. Designed to run on every candidate rather than on the suspicious ones, so the true size is a standard input to feasibility instead of a late discovery.
The Impact
- The true size of a building known before the price is set, not after closing
- A measurement error of up to 14 percent turned from a risk into an edge over buyers still reading the permit
- Feasibility built on a number the group verified itself
- Consistent measurement across every deal, by the same method
Outcome: the group stops trusting the permit's arithmetic and starts trusting its own.