When a customer recently inquired about roofing five apartment buildings in Grass Valley, Calif., Jay Saber didn’t bother to jump in his truck to drive out and take measurements.Mr. Saber, the owner of Saber Roofing Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., instead punched the addresses into Google Inc.’s free Earth software to pull up aerial views of the buildings. He used the program to measure the roofs and eyeball their conditions. After he determined that the job would cost more than $100,000, he emailed the estimate to the client the next day.
The software saved Mr. Saber a roughly 350-mile round trip to see the roofs in person. “Instead of nine hours, I spent 10 minutes on the computer,” he says.
Many small businesspeople like Mr. Saber are turning to Google Earth and other mapping services with aerial imagery such as Microsoft Corp.’s Live Search Maps and closely held Zillow.com to find new clients, estimate job costs and inspect properties, saving time they would have spent driving around.
Rob on August 1st, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Not a bad idea, but since Google earth (and any of the other similar services) are NOT real-time (or anywhere near current, most of the time), using an overhead view pulled from Google Earth can be VERY RISKY to anyone using it as a basis for a financial decision. For example, in my area, there are parts of Google earth views that are at least 3 years old. That would not stand you in good stead if you were to use a picture to do a roofing estimate… roofs can go all to heck in 3 years… All that to say, use tools like Google Earth for generalities, but be cautious of using them for specifics!!!