As-Built & Measured Building Surveys
- Service line
- Reality Capture & BIM
- Coverage
- Dubai and across the United Arab Emirates
- Measured by
- Site survey, referenced to control
- Typical output
- Plans, elevations and sections
Design drawings describe intent. An as-built survey describes the building. Petra Point measures the structure as it stands and produces the drawings from that survey, so the plans, elevations and sections you work from match the thing you are working on.
What an as-built survey gives you
A dimensioned record of the building in its current state, referenced to survey control so every drawing in the set agrees with every other one.
The value is in the difference between that and the design set. Buildings move away from their drawings during construction, and again during every fit-out afterwards. An as-built survey closes that gap with measurement instead of assumption.
As-built survey, or measured building survey
Buyers use both terms, and in practice they usually describe closely related work: measuring an existing building and producing drawings from that measurement.
The emphasis differs by who is asking. "As-built" comes from construction and handover, where the question is what was built against the design record. "Measured building survey" comes from design and property, where the question is what is there to work with. Tell us the outcome you need rather than the label, and the work starts the same either way: measure the building, then draw it.
Drawing deliverables
The set is agreed before the survey, because what you need drawn decides what has to be measured and at what density.
- Floor plans
- Elevations
- Sections
- As-built survey report
- 3D CAD model, where the project needs one
How the drawings are produced
From the survey, not from the design set. That distinction is the whole point of the deliverable, and it is the one thing an as-built drawing can get wrong in a way nobody notices until it costs money.
Where the building justifies it, the measurement comes from 3D laser scanning and the drawings are extracted from the registered point cloud. Where it does not, conventional instrument survey is faster. The drawings that come out are the same kind of document either way.
When you need one
Refurbishment and fit-out, where the new work has to land on what is already there. Handover, where the record has to reflect the building rather than the permit set. Verification, where somebody needs to know whether the built condition matches what was approved.
And the most common one of all: the drawings are missing, incomplete, or old enough that nobody trusts them. Measuring the building is usually quicker than reconstructing its paperwork.