What is the Best Software for Accurate Measurements (Aerial)?

One of the industry's most frightening statistics is that 18.9% of landscaping jobs are unprofitable. Worse still, most of those unprofitable jobs are entirely avoidable: they come from miscalculating the materials or the time it takes to complete jobs.

This where accurate measurements can help. With accurate measurements, you are one step away from knowing exactly how much mulch, asphalt, salt or fertilizer you need. And if you use production rates, you can accurately estimate how long it will take to complete the job. But they all rely on accurate measurement tools.

You have heard all of these expressions before: first call wins, time kills deals, strike while the intent is hot. If you can give your customer a firm quote over the phone, you most likely to win the business. If you are able to respond to a Request for Proposal (RFP) in days rather than weeks, you will not only save a lot of money, you can get an answer before your competitors can even submit a bid.

Even if you insist on traveling to the job site yourself, you will want to have your measurements ready so that you can produce a proposal directly from your customers driveway. Aerial imagery allows you to do this more quickly and efficiently than ever before.

There are three major factors to consider when choosing your software:

1. Accuracy - you want the measurements to reflect what you will see on the ground
2. Speed - the faster you can map the site, the sooner you can create your estimate
3. Comprehensiveness - you want to be able to measure as many things as possible, not just lawns
4. Cost - aerial or satellite measurements should not break the bank: you want a positive ROI from adopting this technology

We score the top softwares for aerial site measurements.

Ideal for: Landscaping, Lawn Care, Snow and Ice Management, Pest Control, Asphalt Sealing, Hard scapes, Soft scapes

Duranta is a software platform for designing, installing and maintaining beautiful outdoor spaces. Duranta is well-known for its AI powered site mapping, intuitive map editing, and in-built calculators that make job costing fast and efficient. Currently Duranta provides detailed measurements for over a dozen items on commercial and residential properties, including: lawns, planted beds, concrete, asphalt, trees, hedges, buildings, pools, sidewalks and more.

Since Duranta has custom built a landscaping AI engine, it is the fastest solution in the industry. It runs in real time, with a max of 2 seconds for large commercial properties. This is perfect for providing live estimates to a customer.

Duranta uses high resolution aerial imagery, and it has built a custom graphics editor: this means that with Duranta you can zoom in 8x more than you can with other software. In practice, this means that you can clearly identify if you are looking at a mulch bed or a rock patch, or understand exactly what parts of a lawn you will want to re-sod. Having a graphics editor gives you a lot of flexibility: you can make edits in real time - if you want to adjust the size of a particular segment or rename it.

Duranta charges a flat rate for measuring everything on the property. Duranta has both a website and a mobile application, making it ideal for office or field use.

Key features:

• Speed: AI powered aerial measurements in real time (1-2 seconds)
• Accuracy: The highest resolution imagery available
• Digital takeoff reports: site maps, spreadsheets and more
• High definition imagery
• Real time edits
• Mobile app and website available
• Residential and Commercial

Ideal for: Landscaping, Lawn Care, Snow and Ice Management, Arbor care

SiteRecon is used for creating comprehensive property measurement reports, including detailed documents with several pages of photographs and measurements. SiteRecon’s positioning is as a complete takeoff and estimation solution that spans everything from measurements to reporting.

SiteRecon has an AI assisted process, after submitting a request the property is mapped and sent to someone who manually counts and measures the areas on the property. This means that you get human eyes on the map, but it comes at the cost of speed and consistency: depending on who is doing the mapping, and what time of day it is ordered, and the size of the property, the report can take 10 minutes to days.

SiteRecon charges based on the size of property and how many items on the property that you want to measure.

Ideal for: Construction, Landscaping, Lawn Care, Asphalt Sealing, Snow and Ice Management

Attentive is used for detailed construction takeoffs and aerial takeoffs. The software analyzes blueprints and captures areas, symbol counts, and generate a detailed bill of materials. Attentive supports multi-location portfolios, and allows annotations such as being able to flag issues and more. Attentive bills itself as an end to end platform that embeds measurements in a comprehensive workflow that includes project management, estimation and other features.

Attentive has an AI assisted process, after submitting a request the property is mapped and sent to someone who manually counts and measures the areas on the property. This affects the speed and consistency of reports, timing can range from 15 minutes to weeks depending on the volume of jobs submitted.

Attentive charges based on property size and offers differing pricing for snow, landscape and other packages.

Ideal for: In depth measuring for individual properties, Landscaping, Lawn Care, Snow and Ice Management, Pest Control, Asphalt Sealing, Hard scapes, Soft scapes

PropertyIntel offers a suite of measuring and estimating tools that makes it well suited for performing in depth measurements and analysis of individual properties. It allows to create measurements on your own using their drawing tools, or to request professionally generated mapping solutions.

PropertyIntel is built to integrate with Aspire’s workflow and project management software, which helps streamline estimating and bidding for individual properties. It is best for large commercial properties that require high attention to detail.

PropertyIntel’s major drawbacks are cost and speed: their done for you estimates take hours to days to complete and at a high cost. However when completed they integrate well with the general Aspire ecosystem.

Ideal for: lawn, pest and fertilization measurement

DeepLawn is used for converting leads on websites into customers. It combines both measuring with an automated checkout workflow that allow homeowners to buy services on your website.

DeepLawn is limited to residential properties, and predominantly measures lawns. It is unable to measure beds, trees, hardscape and other items on a property.

DeepLawn’s measurements take 30 - 60 seconds to generate, and are performed using AI.

All of these software tools have their strengths and weaknesses. What is best for you depends on what you are looking for:

• Duranta is the best combination of speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and price: with Duranta you get precise measurements for over a dozen different aspects of a property, including lawn, beds, trees, hedges, sidewalks, asphalt, concrete, and more. Since Duranta is fully AI powered, it takes just a few seconds to complete a full site map.
• Bottom line: Duranta is best if you are measuring hundreds to tens of thousands of properties a year, and are looking to automate your processes. Duranta might require manual adjustments from you.
• SiteRecon is a good option if you are looking for a combination of comprehensive measurements and estimating software, and you are comfortable outsourcing it to an overseas team to create the measurements.
• Attentive is a good option if you are looking for both blueprint takeoffs and aerial measurements. Attentive’s software also includes comprehensive project management and estimating features.
• DeepLawn is best if you are looking to convert lawn mowing and fertilization customers on your website. It is the second fastest after Duranta in measurements, taking 30 - 60 seconds.
• PropertyIntel is a good option if you are looking to perform highly detailed assessments of specific properties, and are willing to pay large sums and wait for those assessments to be completed. Property Intel integrates directly with Aspire’s suite of estimating, project management and workflow tools making it a good choice for design build projects.

Using aerial images to enhance your sales and estimating processes is an absolute necessity in today’s fast paced market. The best product depends on the type of business you run, how many property’s you measure, and the services you offer.

The best way to evaluate the products is to “try before you buy”. Duranta offers a free two week trial, which allows you to get instant property measurements from your computer or on your phone.