A sheet drawn for a trade, read by a market.
Everything on a floorplan is there for a reason, and almost none of those reasons are leasing. Line weights encode construction. The title block carries the scale, the revision and the sheet number, because the person holding it needs to know which version they are building from. Hatching means a material. It is a good document, addressed to somebody else.
Given to a tenant, the same sheet withholds the two things they want to know. It has no vertical dimension, so the height of the space is invisible. And on a phone, which is where most attachments are opened, the scale bar is smaller than a fingernail and the room labels do not resolve at all.
- Made for construction. Weights, hatches and notation address a builder.
- Flat by design. A plan is a horizontal document, and rooms are experienced vertically.
- Unreadable at phone size. The scale and the labels are the first things to go.
What happens after the enquiry.
Attaching the plan
- The enquiry arrives and the plan goes back as a PDF.
- It opens on a phone, at a size where nothing resolves.
- The tenant asks what the space is actually like.
- An inspection gets booked so the floor can be explained.
- The same explanation is repeated for the next enquiry.
- Forwarded internally, the attachment arrives without you attached to it.
Sending a link
- That same plan was uploaded once. Two minutes.
- You reviewed the extracted model in about an hour.
- The leasing site went live within a day.
- The enquiry gets one link, which opens on a phone.
- The tenant walks the floor before deciding to visit it.
- Forwarded internally, the link still works and still explains itself.
Keep sending it. Send something with it.
The plan remains the document of record, and it should still go in the pack. A surveyor, a fit-out contractor and a tenant’s own architect all want the sheet, at its stated scale, with its revision letter intact. None of them want a model instead of it.
StudiO does not compete with that. It reads the plan and hands back a second document for the people who cannot read the first one. The extraction is draft geometry, right for marketing a space and for the conversations before anyone commits. The drawing set and a measured survey remain their own documents.
- The record. Scale, revision and sheet number live on the drawing, and belong in the pack.
- The technical reader. Contractors and surveyors are the audience the sheet was drawn for.
- The input. That same PDF is what StudiO reads, so nothing new has to be produced.
The short version.
- Audience
- The plan addresses a builder. The leasing site addresses whoever signs the lease.
- Scale
- On the sheet it sits in the title block. In the model it has been read and applied to every wall.
- Height
- A plan states none. Wall height is editable in the viewer.
- On a phone
- An attachment that does not resolve, against a page built to be opened on one.
- Forwarded
- The link works three forwards down the chain, without you in the room.
- Both
- The PDF stays in the pack. It is also the input.
Draft geometry for visualisation, marketing and early decisions. Not construction-grade BIM, and not a measured survey.
Around this comparison.
The other comparison
What changes when the alternative is a commissioned render pipeline rather than an attachment.
Why the title block matters
The corner of the sheet that carries the scale, and what happens to a plan without it.
What replaces the attachment
The model in a browser tab, beside the vector plan fitted to it.