San Francisco reality capture
San Francisco makes owners prove their buildings can stand.
No city ties its building stock to seismic reality quite like San Francisco. A mandatory retrofit program has pushed thousands of wood-frame buildings to reinforce their ground floors. The Victorians and Edwardians that define the neighborhoods are irreplaceable and unforgiving to work on. And a tech office market keeps reshaping interiors block by block. Every one of those jobs rests on knowing the exact existing condition of a building that was framed by hand a century ago. A laser scan is how you get it.
What does a soft-story retrofit need from a scan?
San Francisco's Mandatory Soft-Story Retrofit Program, adopted in 2013 under Ordinance 66-13, covers wood-frame buildings three stories or taller, or two stories over a basement, with five or more units permitted before January 1, 1978. The compliance deadlines have already passed, so owners of covered buildings need reliable existing-condition records both to design the retrofit and to document it for closeout. The weak ground floor, the open garage or storefront that the program targets, is exactly the geometry an engineer has to get right.
A scan captures that soft first story precisely, including the framing, the openings, and how out of plumb things already are. Our wall plumbness analysis measures the lean against the point cloud, and our scan-to-BIM service turns the capture into a model the structural design can be built on.
The Victorians deserve a careful record.
The city is full of historic Victorian and Edwardian wood-frame homes and small buildings, and much of the retrofit and renovation work happens inside that irreplaceable stock. These buildings have ornate facades, bay windows, and interior detail that no drawing ever captured and that a tape measure cannot reasonably record. Scanning documents the exact geometry and character detail before any work begins, which protects the building and gives the design team a precise base.
Our historic preservation scanning is built for exactly this: capturing the ornament and structure of a Victorian at a resolution that holds up through design, permitting, and construction.
Office fit-outs on a fast clock.
San Francisco has a dense tech-office fit-out market, and those interiors turn over quickly as tenants move, expand, and reconfigure. A fit-out designed against out-of-date drawings runs straight into surprises above the ceiling and along the core. A scan captures the real interior, including the existing mechanical and structure, so the design and the construction pricing are grounded in the actual space.
Our building and interior scanning produces that record in a single visit, and it stays useful for the next tenant and the next reconfiguration.
How we cover the San Francisco metro.
We do not keep an office in San Francisco. We serve the metro through a nationwide network of vetted reality-capture technicians, and we produce and stand behind the deliverable ourselves. No local crew claim, no trucks in the Mission, no same-day promise. A scan done right and a deliverable our team is accountable for.
Published prices.
| Deliverable | Price |
|---|---|
| Half-day scan (capture) | $1,500 to $2,300 to start |
| Full-day scan (capture) | $3,500 to $4,100 to start |
| Modeling from the scan | $0.10 / sq ft ($500 min) |
Capture is the scan itself. Modeling is priced by the square footage we turn into a deliverable. Tell us the site and what you need out of it, and we quote it directly.
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Tell us about the San Francisco project.
A soft-story retrofit to document, a Victorian to record before work begins, an office to fit out. Send us the site and what you need out of it. We scan it, build the deliverable, and stand behind it.
Get a quoteQuestions about a project? Reach us at info@scanningandmodeling.com or (772) 210-4584.