Video: All Things iGUIDE Floor Plans | Why Floor Plans Have Value | Video courtesy of iGUIDE YouTube Channel | 15 December 2021


iGUIDE PLANIX Sample 3D Tour and with Interactive Floor Plan courtesy of iGUIDE | 2D Schematic Floor Plans
https://youriguide.com/pla_1_608_jones_st_e_st_marys_on/doc/floorplan_imperial_en.pdf

Transcript (video above)

[00:00:08]
Chris White: I think it's time we get rolling. Let me get my notes, let me get my tea, let me get my cool sunglasses.

[00:00:21]
Chris White: There you go. All right, cool. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for coming to Masterclass Number 71, that's a lot of masterclasses. My name is Chris, I'm going to be your host. I'm a Marketing Manager for Planitar but I was a photographer for many years and I have lots of experience with the capture process, the technology, the floor plans, the iGUIDE viewer, and so on.

[00:00:55]
Chris White: Today we're going to talk about floor plans. Very specifically, what I'd like to do with this webinar is give you a sense of comfort with floor plans. I mean, there's a lot of details on the floor plans and often what I find is that people don't really engage with them beyond the fact that they're floor plans and they provide them to clients and act, here you go, expecting that other people will understand and that can lead to questions.

[00:01:26]
Chris White: What I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through some of the details on the floor plans, very simple stuff. This won't take long, it's very easy, so that when you are giving floor plans to your clients you can be really confident and comfortable talking about them because you'll know what everything is on. Then in addition to that, what I'd like to do as well, if I can, is add some value. Or I should rephrase that. I want to give you the ability to understand why first of all,

[00:01:56]
Chris White: floor plans have value, just in general, but then also give you the ability to in a very simple way speak to why iGUIDE floor plans are better. There you go. I'd like to discuss or tell you about, I should say, floor plans and their role in marketing a property. I think that it's often

[00:02:27]
Chris White: confusing for people when they think about what floor plans are for. I think people get, you guys can correct me in the chat if I'm wrong, that floor plans are a high-value useful item for a real estate listing. For any as-built structure they're useful but sometimes people don't think beyond that. I had a few experiences when I was shooting where I would give people the talk. I'd tell them, ''Oh, are you going to get a 3D tour or are you going to get room dimensions, you're going to get floor plans? ''

[00:02:58]
Chris White: They'd say, ''Oh, that's awesome'' and then they totally would never use the floor plans and it's like why? You didn't use it for anything? No, I didn't feel like printing them out. That's not all floor plans are for but okay. I think that people know that they're good but they don't necessarily know why so that's their defiance. I'm going to tell you some reasons why. One reason why they're good for marketing is you can tell your clients, this is for all floor plans by the way, is that they are perceived as a high-value thing. They make your marketing look good.

[00:03:30]
Chris White: People look at it and go, oh, they did a floor plan, that's good. That alone is sometimes enough which is funny. But then the other reason why floor plans are good is that people just like them. Which is a weird thing. Why do they like them? But I don't really know but I have a study that I'm going to show you right now that is the National Association of Realtors Buyers and Sellers report over here. Let me load it up on screen. I hope you guys can see this. Floor plans are ranked number three in what buyers want to see when they're on the Internet.

[00:04:04]
Chris White: This is just people who are on the Internet which I hope is everyone but whatever, they put it in there so that's why I'm saying it. I hope you guys can see this. Number one is photos, there's no surprise there. Number two is detailed property information and that makes perfect sense. When I'm looking at properties online, personally, I am going to immediately be looking at the first thumbnail photo and then I'm going to continue to look at the photos on that listing throughout my online experience.

[00:04:37]
Chris White: But the second thing I'm going to look at personally is exactly that, how many bedrooms does it have, what's the square footage? I want to know a little bit of information because I can immediately disqualify houses if they're a one-bedroom or something like that. That's not going to work, I have a family. Even if it looks cool I might dive in and have a little look if it's quirky but most of the time I'm going to disregard that. I don't want to waste my time. Or I'll even just sort property straight up by those variables. The third thing, check this out, is floor plans. Floor plans outranks virtual tours,

[00:05:09]
Chris White: video, neighborhood information, stuff that everyone thinks is really important but floor plans is ranked as higher than those by potential buyers. That's a big deal. That's a straight up stat you can use right there if someone asks or if you're trying to convince someone that your floor plans there are awesome. Now I would argue that the benefit or maybe the function,

[00:05:41]
Chris White: the purpose of a floor plan is perfectly illustrated in an iGUIDE. Let's load one up and I'll show you. Do I have one? Oh, look, I even loaded one up there, it's good for me. Here we have an iGUIDE. Obviously, iGUIDEs have floor plans in. We're going to talk more about that later. But that floor plan it's not just there for show, it's not just there to look cool. It's providing a function. It does something for you and it's beneficial, I would argue.

[00:06:13]
Chris White: When I'm looking at photos, this is my personal experience again, I'm getting a sense of the space, what it looks like and what it would be like to be there. Cool. But sometimes I want an experience that's more like a floor plan where it's a map. Where is this room in the home? Well, the floor plan tells me where it is. How does this room connect? How does it flow? How are the paths through the house? What's the size of this room relative to other rooms? The floor plan shows me that. That's the value that is being added here. There's actually a few more things in terms of navigation.

[00:06:45]
Chris White: On the iGUIDE, the floor plan allows me to, like a map, go to a location I click on. That's obviously hugely valuable as well. I would argue that that is the main purpose of a floor plan. The reason I say that and that it's not the measurement aspect is that I'm referring to the floor plan in its visualized form not necessarily the total square footages, although those are extremely important and they're related to the floor plan, obviously. But the floor plan as a visual representation that you use,

[00:07:18]
Chris White: I'm going to say that the benefits are being able to see the connections between spaces, their relative sizes and being able to navigate on them. [inaudible 00:07:24] Now that we've got that out of the way, I think what we're going to talk about, let me check the chat real quick. Hi from Dubai, hi from Canada, good evening from Germany. Hi Germany, Scandinavia. We've got two questions already.

[00:07:47]
Chris White: I'll answer these questions now. These are good questions. Hi Chris, business question. Is there any way to use the floor plan option of iGUIDE plan sometimes you need just the floor plan not 3D tour. The answer is a no. Think of iGUIDE like a system that measures a property and as a weird side effect you get a 3D tour. With something like a computing system it might be the reverse, it most always is. You're shooting a property to get the tour and then you can make a floor plan from that data but iGUIDE is the other way around.

[00:08:20]
Chris White: That means that if you just want a floor plan it's not going to be as friendly as if you want the whole package. Basically you have to shoot it in its entirety. It's not like you save an enormous amount of time on the shooting however, you can do certain things like turn HDR off. If you don't care about the 3D tour then it doesn't matter what it looks like. It doesn't have to be pretty so that means you can get in and out of the house faster but you're still going to have a similar amount of work to do depending on the property size.

[00:08:52]
Chris White: You can probably cut it in half. I actually know that's not right, you can move it a lot faster if you need to shoot fewer scans. Well, either way you save time when you're shooting but you don't save any time or money on the process and it's an identical. When you get your iGUIDE back it's going to be exactly what you think it is which is a full iGUIDE. What you choose to give your client or you can just give them the floor plans if you want. There's no price break, there's is no other package. At the moment there is no way also to get the 3D tour experience but without the 360 visuals.

[00:09:25]
Chris White: There's no way to just have a floor plan. You can just full-screen it. If you're going to do floor plans only, typically what people do is they'll go shoot the property, they'll turn HDR off because they just don't matter. They'll shoot the minimum number of scans, make it nice and fast and then they'll just provide their client with the PDF version. The PDF version of the floor plan has, obviously, the floor plans. I think that it also has the room details so all the room dimensions and square footage are all there. It is a self contained package. You can just hand that over and that'll work.

[00:09:59]
Chris White: Yes, I also hate that you go to other options for that. Is it possible to rename rooms for the floor plan especially in German language? Yes. I'll briefly describe it. I'm not going to give a visual demo because we're running out of time but if you go to the iGUIDE portal on the myiGUIDE list and look at your list of properties. Click the blue "Edit "button, scroll down to preview. Every single room you label is editable and you can also add new room labels by clicking in the top corner and choosing add a label. Yeah, 100 percent, you can edit any room label that you want. Follow up.

[00:10:32]
Chris White: A floor plan is number three in the list and placed higher than doing the 3D tour, why you guys don't offer floor plan only? Well, that's the thing. It's fine. The floor plan is baked into the iGUIDE. This is where people get a little confused. It's not like the floor plan is its own thing and the 3D tour is its own thing. No, the 3D tour is visuals in a floor plan, they are one and the same. They need to be one and the same for that iGUIDE experience to occur. If you think about it, essentially we do offer floor plans only you just discard the 3D tour.

[00:11:05]
Chris White: In order for the drafts people to draw the floor plan they need the visuals. It's the exact same process either way. There's no time savings on our end so that means there's no deal or anything, but I get your point. You're totally right. Okay. I'm going to say I answered these. Answer, answer, answer, answer. Look at me. I know I said I was going to wait till the end to do questions but I just really like answering questions. Can I order just a floor plan without a complete iGUIDE? No, I'm sorry that you can't.

[00:11:36]
Chris White: You have to shoot the iGUIDE and then discard the rest and keep just the floor plan. I hope you heard actually parts of what I said. A much longer detailed explanation preceded your question earlier. Let's move on. I'm going to show you some features of iGUIDE floor plan so that everybody knows what it is that we're dealing with here. Let's load one up. Let me close the chat. Here's a floor plan.

[00:12:14]
Chris White: Let's go to the full size one. On this floor plan, there are a few details that you may or may not know the purpose of. I'm just going to literally tell you. You're going to see little arrows at the edges of the room. Those markers represent the boundaries of the rooms as they are labeled. It says here kitchen. The kitchen is,

[00:12:45]
Chris White: obviously, a rectangular shape. The edges of that kitchen area, that bit of area that represents kitchen are defined by those little arrows you see there. Those little arrows represent the room dimensions. This is actually a really great example. If you look at this living room down here. Can I zoom in a bit under? I can. Look at that. Fancy. We've got this living room. Now you can see this living room, is not a rectangle.

[00:13:18]
Chris White: You guys might already know, this you might not. I'm going to tell you anyway. Room dimensions are longest length to widest width. That can be very frustrating for some people, because if you have a room that's not a rectangle, there are different ways of measuring that room and there is no one agreed upon standards. Our standard that we use that's generally across the board considered to be acceptable, is longest length times widest width. Where it says here, 11 foot 2 inches multiplied by 11 foot 6 inches,

[00:13:49]
Chris White: that represents the dimensions as they are shown by those little arrows. Those little arrows show you what those room dimensions are referring to. You can see that this particular living room narrows toward the bottom of the page there. You can tell from looking at the room dimensions and looking at those arrows that that's not referring to that area. It's referring to the area up here. If you multiply those two numbers, you will actually not get the total square footage of the space, which sounds weird and crazy,

[00:14:20]
Chris White: but that's just the only way to do it, and that's the way we do. On a room that's more rectangular, obviously, it's much easier. You can see the bathroom is basically a perfect square up here. It makes sense. But then you're going to have spaces like the kitchen where that's even weirder. You've got a corner cut off and then this space is not clearly defined. I don't think it is. Anyway, let's look. No it's not. It's a big open concept space. What that means is that the draft people have to choose a place for that space to end.

[00:14:52]
Chris White: They usually choose a logical place. You can see they've lined it up with that the edge of the living room here. They do their best to make it make sense. But they're interpreting the data here, so there can be some creativity there, especially with a corner like that. Either way, let's bring this to our next feature that I want you to notice, and that's room colors. It's a common misconception that the room colors are just like decorative.

[00:15:24]
Chris White: The answer is they are not. They have significance. Every kitchen will be this weird green color. There are color schemes. Let me show you in a second. If you choose a particular color scheme within that scheme, every bathroom will be blue, every living room will be this weird beige, the dining rooms will be brown. I think the bedrooms are brown or something, not like a beige, whatever. This particular color scheme I think is balanced. That means it has a mix of warm and cool elements. It breaks things up, but I think it's my favorite.

[00:15:55]
Chris White: Those means something. Now, the really important one is white. White means that it is not included in the total square footage. That's really important. That shows you that that space is huge massive space. It's added onto the house. It's not in the total. That's important, because one of the really huge benefits of floor plans is that, even if a space isn't included in that total you can still show it. That's really cool. It's different a little bit everywhere you go in North America.

[00:16:26]
Chris White: But for the most part, generally speaking, people will include when they're listing a property, a total square footage that is above grade. What's above and below grade is debatable again. But for the most part, people don't choose the basement. But the basement has a lot of value in terms of what it provides for the house. Like in my basement, it's quite nice. I don't think I could live without it. All my cool toys are down here. What would I do with my day, if I didn't have all these guitars decorating my walls?

[00:17:03]
Chris White: Showing spaces like a basement is something floor plans are really good at. The fact that you can show those spaces even if they're not included, but they appear in the floor plan, you can see immediately that they're there, but all of those aren't in total. That's cool. The other thing that I think I wanted to point out about room boundaries is that there is no one right answer for exactly where room boundary should go.

[00:17:34]
Chris White: The draft people really they just try to do their best, decide where it goes. I don't know if I mentioned that before. There's a few other things on here I'll just point out. I don't think this is a premium flip. No, it's not. I should have chosen a better one. [inaudible 00:17:45]. Well, you know what, I've got one over here. There you go. I'll show you this one. We've got premium elements that can appear. It doesn't come up too often, but just so you know, the dishwasher looks like that,

[00:18:05]
Chris White: refrigerator looks like this, and you'll have cabinets and things drawn in. That's what those represent, if you didn't know. That's a toilet. It's probably really obvious. But those elements are placed where they actually are supposed to go. They're not just randomly tossed in there. It's on purpose where they are. That's why, in case you're ever curious, why we have suggested in the past that you make sure that the cameras are higher in something like kitchen and maybe in the bathroom.

[00:18:36]
Chris White: If you haven't heard that before, this is why. You want to raise the camera up because then what the draft people are going to do is they're going to look at your images and they're going to figure out the precise placement of things like sinks and dishwashers and things that are up a bit higher, so that they can put them on the floor plan accurately. Those aren't just tossed there. They're not guessing. They're trying to get them to be in their actual correct position. Then since I have it up I'll just mention it. The biggest difference between standard and premium is those details;

[00:19:08]
Chris White: sinks and toilets and bathtubs and whatever. There's obviously difference in price. The reason that there's difference in price is that it requires them time to figure out where those elements go. That's an additional value. You're paying for it, obviously. The time and the work that goes into that is not insubstantial. Let's talk about color schemes real quick. It's a cool widgety thing on here I made like a million years ago.

[00:19:41]
Chris White: Let's see if it works. Yeah, it does. People ask constantly if they can change the colors on the floor plans. Like I said, the colors are not random. They represent stuff.

[00:20:00]
Chris White: We don't give you the ability to change them individually. I know some people do, but we don't, because they have meaning for us, and that's why. That's what I'm getting at. However, there are color schemes you can work with. Even if you don't exactly like what you've got, you do have some flexibility. There's balanced, which has a bunch of weird beiges and a little green thing going on here. You've got warm. That's a lot of beige. Look at that. It's a kaleidoscope of Band-Aid colors. I love it. We have cool. That's frosty. It's nice. We have gray.

[00:20:37]
Chris White: Really weird fun fact. The is gray very popular. I feel like it's the most boring one, but if you like it, that's cool, but it's very popular. People use it way more often than I ever would have expected. Which is funny. The way you change the color profiles is by going to the portal, finding your iGUIDE in the my iGUIDE section, clicking the blue edit button in the top right-hand corner. There's all these options on there.

[00:21:07]
Chris White: You'll see a thing for selecting the color theme for the floor plans. Fun fact, you can choose a different one for the 3D tour then for the PDFs. If you want the 3D tour to be really colorful and balanced, and you're like, "Oh, I want a serious PDF." It's all business. You can go with gray. I don't know if people ever do that, but you can, it's cool.

[00:21:39]
Chris White: Or if someone specifically requests that difference for some reason can cater to that. Cool. There's a few details on here I didn't mention and they should probably be obvious, but I'll go through them in a minute. You've got windows. Those are represented by the icy blue bricks in the exterior walls of the floor plan. Let me load up the actual [inaudible 00:22:01]. There we go. You've got door swings. Door swings are obviously the directions doors swing and they're represented by a little line and then like

[00:22:09]
Chris White: a little connecting arc that goes from the door jamb to the edge of door. Cool. You've got obviously stairs. Stairs are done in this peculiar way. It was actually mentioned. Marius described it in our last masterclass, the redrafting Q&A one, we talked about why they do it this way, which I didn't know, which was very cool, but it makes sense. You can see the stairs go up. But then in order for you to get a sense of the fact that there's two staircases. There has to be this point at which you switch from one staircase to the other,

[00:22:43]
Chris White: supposing that they're on top of each other. They do that with this little wall. I was like, " I was like why don't they makes sense?" Of course, you do that. How else would you do it otherwise? If you didn't, you wouldn't know where to stop or start them anyway. I thought that was quite cool.

[00:22:58]
Chris White: That's neat. What else we got? I mentioned that included versus exclusive. I'm going to say it again because it's so important. Anything white on the floor plans. That's garages, cold sellers, three-season rooms. Anything white is not included in the total square footage. Cool. Let's talk about deliverables now. How are we doing for time? We're doing good. Okay. Deliverables means what do you get when you're in this? Because you don't just get PDF floor plans, there's a lot more than that.

[00:23:30]
Chris White: We're going to start right here with this floor plan. A lot of people take this for granted. The fact that you get a floor plan in the iGUIDE. Every iGUIDE has a floor plan. It's not like a stylistic representation of a floor plan. This is legitimately a real actual floor plan that you can measure on and it's nearly identical to the one. It is identical, but obviously, it's presented differently to the one in the PDF, in the SVG, in the DXF also. This particular floor plan has a very unique and amazing advantage. It probably is.

[00:24:04]
Chris White: I'm just going to say it, it's the best floor plan because you can measure on it. Typically with a floor plan, what you would do is you'd have a scale bar. Actually, I'll even show it. There you go. If you look here, you've got a scale bar. That means that obviously the distance from end to end of this bar is 8 feet. If you were to measure on this floor plan, you could measure details based on that scale bar. That's a very old school way of doing it. You don't need to do it anymore.

[00:24:37]
Chris White: It's 2021. We have on-screen measurements now. This floor plan allows you to measure anything you want right on there. That is one of the greatest strengths of the iGUIDE is that this simple way of measuring on a floor plan is just so useful. All the lines are persistent. If you want to measure for, couch, this is a terrible couch. That's okay. Moving on. You can do that. You can measure windows, you can measure doors, you can measure whatever you want. It's so fast that it's absolutely lovely to work with.

[00:25:11]
Chris White: When you're looking for houses, a lot of your questions, or a lot of homeowners quite are potential home buyers questions are about measurement are like, "Was this is going to fade or how big is this? If I put a couch here, can I walk in between this thing and this thing?" All those questions can be answered from here. That's one of the huge advantages of this floor plan. You can certainly do that other floor plans, but here it's like baked in. It's fun fact time, something a lot of people don't know. If you click the measurement button, there's a download button here. If I click the download button,

[00:25:42]
Chris White: it will actually download the floor plan with the measurements on it. Can I load it up and show you? I totally can't check it out.

[00:25:54]
Chris White: That's ridiculously cool. You can also just screen capture if you would feel like it, but it's baked in. That was a thing that was added for IRC so that you can rate it the data in a separate software and sketch it. But here's the coolest thing about this. Let's suppose you want to go order an area rug. Typically what you do before you truck it over to Ikea is you get to tape measure out, measure and maybe do a little weird drawing or whatever.

[00:26:25]
Chris White: You think about what would be a cool thing for the space. Rather than do that, you can also just bring your phone with the iGUIDE provided you have one for your house. What you do is you take this and you actually draw out approximately the size of the rug that you're looking at. Then you hit save. Then you can use that as a reference when you're doing stuff. When you save it on your phone or whatever. You can basically have this little record of all the measurements

[00:26:56]
Chris White: that you take because these aren't like permanent, obviously you can't save them. But if you save it as a JPEG, you totally can. If you're doing comparison shopping and actually draw in things that you're considering getting are up. Measuring for blinds is the best. You can measure all the windows and save it. Then if you're going around to different stores and shopping, you don't have to load at the iGUIDE every time and measure it. Very cool. Anyway, that's the benefit of this floor plan is that it's interactive. Obviously other than that, you can click on it and look at stuff, that's cool too. Also, this floor plan is connected to the visuals,

[00:27:27]
Chris White: which means that if you really want to, you can also measure using advanced measurement modes using the actual visuals. I won't go into huge detail because we're going to run out of time, but very cool. The next type of floor plan, probably the most obvious one everyone knows about is PDF's. PDFs are cool. They're considered a high-value thing. You can print them out, you can take them and chop them up, put them in other documents, brochures and they'll go in the feature sheet creator if you want, which is quite cool. The PDFs have a really cool advantage that you guys actually did get to earlier,

[00:28:04]
Chris White: which is that it stand on their own so that you want to deliver floor plans only, they have everything, all the room dimensions right here. Method of measurements in here. We'll get to that. There's all cool explanations and stuff in here. It's awesome.

[00:28:25]
Chris White: You can have those be a downloadable in addition to the iGUIDE and there can just be a different way to get that information, which is neat.

[00:28:38]
Chris White: The 32 or in the PDFs, everybody knows about those. Now, we're going to talk about the weird ones. Actually, the first one's not weird, it's just JPEGs. You can get JPEG floor plans and you can include them in the gallery. I don't think they're in the gallery. I don't have them. But putting the floor plans in the gallery is just another way to get people to see them. It's very popular to have on your list and portal, whatever that may be Realtor.com [inaudible 00:29:01], to get your agent to put those floor plans in the gallery so that when people are swiping through, they don't just miss them.

[00:29:10]
Chris White: Every listening portal is a little different. Some of them will show that iGUIDE really in a very large way, like right up front so everyone can see it. Some other ones hide stuff like Zillow and Realtor.com. They've got buttons here or there. When you click on it, they're loaded up, but they're not immediately obvious. Because photos, we're piggybacking on the fact that everybody knows that photos are number one. If you can take the floor plans and put them in the photos, then people won't miss them, they're going to see it because they're going to be looking at photos because everyone knows they're there.

[00:29:43]
Chris White: JPEGs are exactly what they sound like, JPEGs. Then you've also got SVGs. SVGs is a vector format, Scalable Vector Graphics, and those are used when you want to do well, some weird or more custom stuff. PDFs can do this too, but SVGs are good if you want to do some really weird custom stuff. If you've got a certain look that you're going for, you can straight up, download the SVGs, you can change any of the room colors, you can use either Acrobat, or Adobe Illustrator,

[00:30:15]
Chris White: or any other editing software that can deal with vector graphics to make changes. When you do that, there'll be scalable, which means there's no law, essentially there's no resolution. What I mean by that is if you download a JPEG and you try to make it bigger, you're going to run out of resolution at some point. It'll start getting pixelated. But Scalable Vector Graphics, EPS files, or AI file, or whatever, they don't do that, they're not bitmapped data, they're vectors instead, which just means mine, so they're scalable.

[00:30:47]
Chris White: That's really cool. That means that if you have really high-end client, has a design department, they want to take the floor plans, do something really wacky with them, no problem. Give them the SVGs. SVGs are used to get really, really good results when you're doing tricky things with the floor plans.

[00:31:09]
Chris White: The last one I'm going to talk about is DXFs. DXFs are funny. A lot of residential real estate photographers don't really work with AutoCAD. They don't want any kind of CAD software. DXFs are mysterious. There's lots of other files, CAD file formats that sound a bit like DXF. It's very confusing. But I'm going to show you what they look like and they're really cool. DXF are a drafted floor plan.

[00:31:40]
Chris White: But they also contain the point cloud data and everything is organized into layers. The reason you might want is if you are an architect, or a designer, or a contractor, or someone who wants more information, and also someone who just works with CAD. If you're working with CAD it's easier, you can bring it right in. But here, I'll show you what they look like. Here is a DXF. I'm just using a cheap free viewer, it doesn't let me do much.

[00:32:11]
Chris White: But I hope you can see that all of the lines are here in terms of the walls. They look different. You've got, just going to zoom in a bit. The red line represents the interior wall. This green line represents the exterior wall. The outside of the exterior wall. This is the inside of the exterior ones to the outside. This is the interior sister. All the interior walls are obviously present. What is this? There was a dentist office. That's why it's weird. But you've probably already noticed that there are a lot of dots.

[00:32:44]
Chris White: That's the actual point cloud data that you shot and every DXF has this. It's going to have the point cloud data and then on top of it, the drafters interpretation of that property. This is really cool. If you are an architecture designer and you're getting a lot of value out of the floor plans, but there's some weird detail that you need more information about, it's there, it's in the DXF, in the point cloud sometimes. That can make it a little bit easier to design around certain objects because you'll have more measurement data

[00:33:14]
Chris White: than it's actually shown in the floor plan. The trouble with DXFs is that for a lay person to describe their use, it can be very challenging. I don't have AutoCAD, I can't just load it up and show people what it is. I'll tell you what to do. If you are working with an architect or a designer and they ask you, hey, I need a CAD file. Say, okay, I have DXFs, and they might be like, what's a DXF? Sometimes they don't know. What you do is you just send them a sample. The way you find a DXF is you go on the portal,

[00:33:45]
Chris White: find your property, click the blue edit button, go on the left, go down. It'll say DXF floor plans right in the bottom left-hand corner. Click it and you'll download them. When you download them, you won't be able to view them unless you have some CAD software. What you can do is get a piece of software like this. This is DWG FastView. It's pretty good. It is very fast. I've got it here. I can look at DXFs, I can zoom when I can. I can't really do much about anything else, but it's cool. It shows me what someone would see if I were to send it to them.

[00:34:16]
Chris White: This again can build some confidence here. You can actually look at the DXFs so when you're providing to people you can talk confidently about what's actually included, which is nice. The DXFs are a little different and so are the SVGs, in that they're not included in the iGUIDE report. That means there's an extra step if you need to send them to somebody. That's not a bad thing or a good thing, it's just something to consider. If you've got an architect or an engineer, it's not as simple as just taking the tour and then sending a report, you're done.

[00:34:52]
Chris White: Someone has raised their hand. How does that work? Did you ask a question in the chat? I'm not sharing the DXF screen. You got to be kidding, this all time I have been talking. That's hilarious. There you go. Right now you can see it. I'll just edit it in, no one will know the difference. Here is the DXF. Anyway have a look. It's a good idea to download a sample and mess around with one that you're familiar with. It'll help you out.

[00:35:24]
Chris White: What are we up to now? Create one at a time. I'm going to hit the benefits of iGUIDE floor plans over other floor plans. There's lots. Benefit number one, I'm going to switch screens again. Sorry, you're not going see the DXFs anymore. New share. Let's go back to this one. Benefit number one is that you can measure on the floor plans, already went over that, but that these four plans are real. They're not like stylized, weird floor plans.

[00:35:56]
Chris White: They're in the 3D too. They're actual floor plans. Number two, method of measurement. Let's go back to the PDFs. I realize now that you guys weren't seeing my PDFs either. That's embarrassing.

[00:36:24]
Chris White: Anyway PDFs, they have the method of measurement built-in as does the iGUIDE. Unlike other floor plan providers, it's not as though these floor plans were just drawn by some random person according to what they think floor plans should look like. There are very specific reasons why things are drawn and certain things are included and excluded, and all of that means that you're going to get very consistent results and that

[00:36:56]
Chris White: the data from these floor plans can be used to list a property with confidence because you'll know exactly what we're talking about, so that's cool. Fun fact, this is a cool one and you guys have probably noticed this, I hope, is that our turnaround time is really good for floor plans. We are a market leader right now. We can get floor plans back to you faster than almost anyone else, with the exception of someone who's just waiting there just to draw your floor plan. So turnaround time for floor plans can be two to four days in some cases,

[00:37:28]
Chris White: so it's all well and good to have that virtual tour done in 15 minutes if it's all automated. But without the listing information, without a floor plan, listing data, it can be much more challenging to list a property in a lot of places. How cool is that? Market leader.

[00:37:49]
Chris White: Let's see, let's go back here, and then I mentioned this already, the ability to measure on the floor plan is huge. That's absolutely massive. Huge advantage. Then the ability to get access directly to the point cloud without paying an extra costs is also quite cool. That's like a side note. I'm going to stop talking and answer questions because I can see that there's literally 11 questions.

[00:38:20]
Chris White: If you do more scans, does that increase the accuracy of the measurements? No, not exactly. It could under certain really weird random circumstances. But for the most part, not really. There's two reasons why you want to do more scans. The first is measurement coverage, so you're going to be able to make sure that you've got everything. So if the geometry is complicated, you want to make sure you get the camera into all the spaces so you can get all those complicated details. That improves accuracy in terms of what is drawn but

[00:38:50]
Chris White: also can improve accuracy in terms of square footage because they'll catch things they might have missed. I'm going to give you an example of accuracy, but not accuracy in terms of square footage. Let's suppose I shoot a second story of a house and there's two bedrooms, and in-between the two bedrooms, there are closets, and I don't shoot those closets. Well, the drafters, they're pretty smart. They're going to know what the perimeter is. They're going to know those are closets from the visuals, but they won't know where the wall is between the two closets. If I do more scans, open up the closets and shoot and hit the back wall,

[00:39:22]
Chris White: they'll know precisely where that wall is. Essentially, if they draw the wall in the right place, that means it's more accurate, it doesn't example. The other reason why you would do more scans is just to change the experience of the tour. Sometimes more scans just makes it easier to see details people want to see. It gives them a different walk-through experience when they're navigating visually. So that's why you would shoot more scans, not really for accuracy. With the new update, what is your option would you recommend to avoid blowing elements? I'll get to that one in a minute. We'll do that one last.

[00:39:53]
Chris White: Sometimes we face two different elevations on the same room. Is that any features show the elevation of the floor plan? No, the elevations on the floor plan will be separated by a line. There is a thing, I think. I don't have an example of that, but it's essentially like a stair.

[00:40:10]
Chris White: Unless it's a big elevation change in which case it's a totally separate floor either way.

[00:40:18]
Chris White: Well, I mean the visuals, obviously, there is a thin line.

[00:40:25]
Chris White: I don't want to go off-topic, but wanted to ask if iGUIDE has any means to do a live guided tours? Yeah, iGUIDE virtual showing. I don't know if that's what you're getting at. There's two things actually. You said live, so live tour implies that someone is giving tour. The way you would do that would be a click the "Share" button, click "Create Virtual Showing", and then go through that process. So I won't go into any detail about virtual showings, but those are live guided tours.

[00:40:59]
Chris White: They basically allow you to take control of someone else's screen and show them the iGUIDE and walk them through, which is quite cool. It's what I've done. There we go. Amazingly accurate over 66 feet with the church I did in six millimeters. We've actually got some really cool measurement statistics that are coming down the pipeline. It is really accurate, it's very cool. Thank you, Peter. Awesome. PDF document is always English, is it possible to order in German?

[00:41:29]
Chris White: Yeah, so if you change the room labels, they'll all change as well. Another fun fact that I didn't think about. When you're changing room labels on the iGUIDE, the iGUIDE floor plan and the PDFs and the SVGs, they're all connected. I should have mentioned this in the benefits, this is a cool one. What I mean by connected is that when you go into the editor and you change a room label, it doesn't just change on the iGUIDE. It changes for the PDFs and SVGs as well, so everything is together. That means that if you change it on the iGUIDE, it changes on the PDF and it changes on the SVG,

[00:41:59]
Chris White: which means if you made a feature sheet with the feature creator, it's also changed there too. So you just have to basically change them all on the editor and then they'll stick. I'll answer that one can see the access, sorry about that.

[00:42:19]
Chris White: Do we need to uncover curtains to show where windows are placed? Does the drafter approximate location or does he need the frame edges exposed? That's an excellent question. They're not super fussy about it just because in the real world, it probably isn't practical to go to every window and uncover it. However, that being said, if accuracy is your primary concern and you want those windows placed perfectly, the answer is yes. Yeah, you would. You want to make sure the drafters can see exactly where it starts and stops

[00:42:50]
Chris White: so they know the precise place to put that window and its width.

[00:43:02]
Chris White: Does iGUIDE have Bluetooth capabilities? Could I connect the iGUIDE to the Room Scanner app from local metric? The answer is no. So it doesn't use Bluetooth. It's purely Wi-Fi and it only works with the app built in to the camera for now.

[00:43:23]
Chris White: Best practices for shooting small areas like closets. Everybody hates closets. I hate closets too. Best practice. Always shoot closets, especially if they're on a perimeter. When you shoot closets, try your best to capture some data from the back wall of the client. Your goal here is to get accurate floor plans. So that means that you want to make sure that the drafters can see what the dimensions are of every space, including all the little weird ones like closets.

[00:43:55]
Chris White: In a perfect world, every closet would just be empty and it would be super easy. But we don't live in that world.

[00:44:03]
Chris White: The best thing you can do is scan every closet that you can get your hands on. It does take extra time, but whatever. It's for the best. If a closet is just full of stuff and it's an interior closet, do your best. Scan it anyway. At least they'll know what it is. This is very rare, by the way, if you come across a closet that happens to be on the exterior of a property and happens to be just full of junk, then you might need to reach in and move some stuff to either side so you can hit the back wall.

[00:44:34]
Chris White: Then really rare, this has only ever happened to me like twice out of thousands of properties, you might have to just ask the homeowner if they're there, "I need you to move some stuff. I need to measure that back wall." Often they're like, "Yeah, no problem." Once they figured out that you're measuring and that you're not photographing that for the virtual tour, they're usually super cool about it, just moving stuff in general. People get a little weird when they think you're photographing their trash closets. But when you tell them that it's just for the floor plans, they're usually fine.

[00:45:05]
Chris White: Yes. Shoe closets. If a client doesn't want a small room scan, can we exclude it from the floor plan upon request? Yeah. Here's what you do, I'm going to give you my hot take on this. It's so common. There's two most common problems, all photographers and especially iGUIDE photographer space. All photographers, you show up to the property and it's not ready yet. It's the number one thing. A number one problem. That's annoying. The second most common problem is that you show up and they've done something where they've created like a dump room where they've cleaned up certain areas but not all areas.

[00:45:39]
Chris White: They get a little weird about you going into messy spaces. They often say like, "Can you just not go down on there?" The answer is, "Of course, we're not going to show the ugly space." But it still needs to be measured. That means that I'm still going to go in there with this camera thing and I'm still going to shoot it. The reason that you want to measure it is that it will be included in the total square footage, if you don't measure it then the total square footage will essentially be wrong. You can absolutely publish an iGUIDE with that omitted, but that's really dangerous because then you've got these square footage totals and it's not clear that they're missing stuff.

[00:46:14]
Chris White: It's probably obvious because I mention it in every webinar, but I'll just say it again because it's really important. The total square footage of a property is used to determine its value. If someone buys a property thinking it's 5,000 square feet, and then when they buy it, they find out it's 4,800 square feet, they get really angry about that 200 square feet that they just thought they paid for. It's totally irrelevant in most cases, but that's just how it works. That means that although you can technically exclude it from the floor plan,

[00:46:45]
Chris White: I would recommend that you never do that, unless you're absolutely desperate, which is fine, you can just turn off all the measurements, but you can totally exclude the images. Turning PAN-OS on and off, you have total control over what people see and what they don't see. You can just go into the editor on the portal and just double-click it and turn it off. That's one of the huge advantages of floor plans. You can do a whole unfinished basement, turn off all the panoramas, and although you can't see it visually, you can see the floor plan and you still get some value out of that space,

[00:47:17]
Chris White: even if it's not included in the total square footage, and even if it's not visually shown, at least you've got a floor plan showing that there's all that space down there and that it has potential, for example. People get really weird about showing large, empty unfinished spaces, I don't know why. I see them as awesome because they are just pure rec room potential. I think of all the guitars I could line up on the walls after a drywall. I answered that one. Oh, I skipped one. If I shoot an area to just include it on the floor plan, can I just deselect the panel? Yes. I just answered that.

[00:47:48]
Chris White: You can totally turn any panels you want off or on. A little bit of time, I'll go into that. You have full control over the visuals. You can turn off and on anything you want. Sometimes that means you shoot spaces that are ugly with the knowledge that you're absolutely going to turn them off. Sometimes you shoot extra panoramas purely for experimentation, knowing that you're going to turn them off. It's going to sound very artistic. But what you want to do with your PAN-OS is you want to sculpt them into something that is effective and attractive.

[00:48:21]
Chris White: It's balanced, it's like anything else. Too many looks weird, too few, and you compromise the experience. What I mean by that is you want to have enough scan position so that people can move throughout the property and see what they need to see. But you don't want to have so many that they have to click on the visuals like 50 times to get from the dining room to the living room. Also it makes the floor plan look weird because you have all these dots and it looks like it's been peppered. My suggestion would be to especially if you just started, overshoot,

[00:48:55]
Chris White: shoot a lot, and then go into your iGUIDE after you've had it drafted and then just think about it. If someone's going to go to this tour, what experience are they going to have? I would say and I've also done this, I would say the number one thing people don't do when they create virtual tours because they never look at them. I probably didn't look at the first 400 I made. I didn't care, I just shot them in the sample. If you go in and look at the tour, you learn a lot about what it is that you're making.

[00:49:27]
Chris White: I spent all this time on photos and making sure they are perfect, on the tour you just send them on, but it doesn't matter because you can make a few little tweaks and you can keep yourself out of a lot of trouble. I tend to err on the side of caution most of the time. I'll turn off a lot of panoramas that may or may not get me into trouble, messy rooms, or whatever. But you can have a conversation about those. You don't need to turn them off. You [inaudible 00:49:54] ask your plan. Either way, overshoot, shoot too many panoramas, and then dial it back.

[00:49:59]
Chris White: The way you'll have happen is that you'll have some that look better than others for no apparent reason. Then you'll also have mistakes and you'll have a panorama that's got some guy walking through the background. You didn't see him when you're shooting. No big deal, you've got lots of extras, so you can turn off and create a nice-looking tour that still gives people the ability to get the information that they need and see things that we want to see. All right, done. Setting up the initial view for each shot, something that simple can only improve. Yes, 100%, so setting up the first thing people see?

[00:50:31]
Chris White: Exactly. If the first thing people see is a blank wall or side of a couch or something strange, that can be very off-putting. Very odd. That's really important, especially if you're navigating via the floor plans. Because when you click on any dot, the first thing you see is whatever the camera was first pointed at or what people have said it. Yes, 100%. A toilet. Well, you got to have a good toilet shot. Every iGUIDE or real estate listings are really solid shot of that toilet.

[00:51:05]
Chris White: Preferably lid open, maybe contents inside, I don't know. Just for fun, and a Christmas tree. The listing just makes sense in July. I answered that. Okay. Good. Let's call it there. I think we're good. Let's say you went off those gentlemen.

[00:51:24]
Chris White: Is there a way to depict ceiling height in the floor plan? No, but you can get it using measurement tool. I don't have that on this particular iGUIDE but you can do height measurements where you want. Ceiling height is a tricky thing. I used to do [inaudible 00:51:39] calculations or heated volume calculations for houses and ceiling height is not as simple as just like one height for the whole house. We actually did provide that for a bit. We found it was more trouble than it was worth because if you have sloped ceilings,

[00:51:56]
Chris White: vaulted ceilings, anything that's not just like really flat or different ceiling heights, then giving one number doesn't reflect that. The best thing to do is just use measurement tool, measure the ceiling height for the area that you're specifically looking for angle of that, 100%.

[00:52:11]
Chris White: HDR, of course, I almost forgot. Thank goodness you remind me. I'll give you the skinny on a new HDR.

[00:52:21]
Chris White: What the software developers did, is they put the HDR algorithms from IMS-5 into PLANIX. It's very cool. The built-in Rico HDR, the look and feel of it, I don't like it, it's desaturated, the contrast is low, it's a little weird. You can certainly get it where you needed to go and stitch by just adding contrast back in. But now you have extra options. I can't show them to you, but I'll describe them. In the setting section, under HDR,

[00:52:52]
Chris White: instead of on-off, it is now a series of options. You've got off as well, but you have on and use the Rico version, you have on, and you have iGUIDE with a bracket setting. Then you have two other options for iGUIDE with different brackets settings, so they mirror what's in IMS-5. You don't have full control, you can't specifically change the brackets. But very few people actually did that in IMS-5. They just use the default.

[00:53:22]
Chris White: The defaults are minus 5 plus 2, which is very iGUIDE standard for interiors. If you're going to pick one to use, that's the one you want, minus 5 plus 2. There's also minus 3 plus 3. That's just a standard run-of-the-mill 3 under 3 overexposure value HDR, and then there's a minus 1 plus 1. Here's how I would use those. For retaining highlights, you want minus 5 plus 2.

[00:53:54]
Chris White: Can we take panoramas for balconies to show [inaudible 00:53:55] Yeah, for sure. You can totally do that. You can do in two ways. You can just use the iGUIDE camera, shoot balcony, you can go outdoors, do whatever you want, or you can use a separate camera, for 316 you can add them and use your panoramas. We've got separate webinars on that, so I won't go into it. But 100%, take the camera outside. Not like in the rain obviously, unless you have an umbrella, I guess. But the HDR settings, the whole point of them is that they are better looking right out of the camera. They're going to have better contrast, better saturation, so that's cool.

[00:54:25]
Chris White: Then the highlights are going to be better. What you think makes for good highlights is arguable. Everyone has a different opinion. But I think they are better, and they're definitely different to my taste for sure, there's more detail 100%, so I think they are better, but the best thing to do when you first get the firmware is to straight up, just go to a room where it has a window, shoot it, and then change the setting, choose the Rico one and shoot it and then choose the iGUIDE one and shoot it. Maybe try the different settings out, see what you think.

[00:54:58]
Chris White: You're going to notice that of the three iGUIDE settings, they're low, medium, high. The high one is going to be the best for interiors, the medium one sometimes it's a little different, just an option, and then the low one minus 1 plus 1 EV, that's when you're standing outside by a like a pool. That's like more of an outdoor thing. We are going to only use that if you just want something a little more interesting than straight up, no HDR, but that one's a little dangerous. If you have that one on and you're in an area like you're outside, but you're on a porch,

[00:55:30]
Chris White: you'll still have pretty dark shadows and pretty bright highlights, that really wouldn't do as well as minus 5 plus 1. The reason I say that is those used to be labeled differently on IMS-5 that the minus 5 plus 2 was labeled interior and the minus 1 plus 1 was labeled exterior. People sometimes mistakenly thought, "Oh, I should use this minus 1 plus 1 outside." But no, don't do that. Only think about it in terms of dynamic range. If you're in an environment with really deep shadows and really bright highlights, and you want the strongest version minus 5 plus 2,

[00:56:00]
Chris White: you're outside and you've got few shadows, minus 1 plus 1, and then minus 3 plus 3 is just a weird one for the middle.

[00:56:10]
Chris White: Yes. I answered it. We're good. Let me check. Minus 5 plus 2. I like this, John. I think it's really great. We're going to call it there. Thank you all so much for listening to me for an hour. I really appreciate it. Like I said, we have some cool masterclasses coming up. We're going to take a break obviously for Christmas, but please join the Facebook group and go say stuff and put pictures on there. I've got some cool content coming for next year for that. Go subscribe to YouTube channel.

[00:56:42]
Chris White: See you guys later. Have a great day. Thanks so much.



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