Gleeds grew its OpenSpace-based reality-capture service from 16 pilot users to 1,900 and reports £2 million in client savings for 2025

Fri, 13 Nov 2026 06:34:18 -0500

Gleeds, an international property and construction consultancy, announced on November 10, 2026, that it will expand Visualise, its reality-capture service, after using it on about 340 projects in ten countries. Visualise runs on OpenSpace, software that places 360-degree photos from a site walk onto the project’s floor plans. Gleeds says the service has grown from a 16-person pilot in 2022 to more than 1,900 users and helped its clients save around £2 million in 2025. The work it changes is the site record behind progress reports, change orders, claims and defect closeout.

What it does

On most jobs, the record of what an area looked like on a given date lives in a superintendent’s phone, a stack of daily reports and the memory of whoever walked the floor. When a ceiling closes over ductwork that later leaks, or a trade says its work was in place before a change was issued, a project engineer has to rebuild that record by hand.

Visualise follows the order of a site walk:

A team member walks the site with a 360-degree camera mounted on a hard hat. Gleeds says the camera captures images automatically as the person walks.
OpenSpace’s software works out the camera’s path. IN Site, a UK construction trade publication, explains that it uses image-based simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM, which estimates where the camera is by tracking how features shift from one frame to the next. The images are then pinned to their locations on the floor plan.
The result is a walkable, dated record of each area. A user can open the same room on different walk dates. Gleeds’ service page says its teams use split views and BIM Compare, which sets the photo beside the model, to find defects and verify work.
During the walk, or later from a desk, users add Field Notes. A Field Note is a photo or a point in the 360-degree image with a description, markup, assignee and due date. OpenSpace says Field Notes sync both ways with Procore Observations and Punch List items and with Autodesk Issues, and export to PDF reports.

At Gleeds, the users are consultants working for owners, such as project managers and cost managers. On a US general contractor’s job, the camera would go to a project engineer or assistant superintendent. The PM, the superintendent and whoever prices change orders would read the record.

Evidence so far

The evidence is Gleeds’ announcement, OpenSpace’s press release of the same day, and Gleeds’ service page. Every figure comes from those two companies. IN Site describes the savings figure as a company-reported outcome.

These claims come from Gleeds and OpenSpace:

Visualise began in 2022 as a 16-person pilot and now has more than 1,900 platform users in ten countries.
It has been used on approximately 340 projects, from office fit-outs and listed building refurbishments to Peru’s Bicentennial Schools Programme, which spans several sites.
Teams have logged more than 50,000 site observations, issues and actions in Field Notes against live project records.
Clients saved around £2 million in 2025.
Teams report improvements of up to 75% in progress reporting, change management, claims assessment and defects resolution. Gleeds’ service page compares this with traditional manual methods.
Users logged nearly 10,000 hours of remote site viewing, according to OpenSpace.

Visualise deployment figures reported by Gleeds and OpenSpace, November 2026
Measure	Value	Unit	Period	Qualifier	Reported by
Users in the original pilot	16	people	2022		Gleeds and OpenSpace
Platform users	1900	people	2022 to November 2026	more than	Gleeds and OpenSpace
Projects	340	projects	2022 to November 2026	approximately	Gleeds and OpenSpace
Countries	10	countries	2022 to November 2026		Gleeds and OpenSpace
Site observations issues and actions logged in Field Notes	50000	entries	2022 to November 2026	more than	Gleeds and OpenSpace
Hours of remote site viewing	10000	hours	2022 to November 2026	nearly	OpenSpace
Client savings	2000000	GBP	calendar year 2025	around	Gleeds and OpenSpace
Efficiency improvement in selected activities	75	percent	not stated	up to	Gleeds and OpenSpace

Source: openspace.ai

Dividing the totals by the project count shows the scale on an average job. The table below is a Construction Metrics calculation from the reported figures. It averages four years of work across projects of very different sizes, so treat each number as a rough order of magnitude.

Reported totals divided by approximately 340 projects, Construction Metrics calculation
Measure	Reported total	Projects	Per project
Platform users	1900	340	5.6
Field Notes entries	50000	340	147
Hours of remote site viewing	10000	340	29

A breakdown of the £2 million by project or by activity, and the baseline behind the 75% figure, are not yet public. Bricks & Bytes, a construction technology newsletter, wrote that splitting the savings into fewer site visits, faster decisions, less rework and fewer disputes would make the business case clearer. It also pointed out that Gleeds delivers the technology inside its consulting service, with a defined purpose and a growing user base.

Sheldon Atkinson, head of Visualise at Gleeds, said in the announcement: “That means decisions can be made with greater confidence, issues can be resolved faster, and less time is lost trying to piece together fragmented information.”

How to measure it on your projects

Gleeds names four activities where it sees gains. Each one has a unit a contractor already tracks, and the table pairs them.

The four activities Gleeds names, and a unit to track for each
Activity	What the visual record supplies	Unit to track in a pilot
Progress reporting	Dated 360-degree images of each area to compare across walks	Hours to assemble the monthly progress report
Change management	Images of an area before and after an instruction was issued	Days from change event notice to agreed scope
Claims assessment	Time-stamped evidence of which work was in place on a given date	Hours spent reconstructing site conditions per claim
Defects resolution	Field Notes pinned to the floor plan with photos and an assignee	Days from defect logged to closed

Start with progress report hours, the staff hours spent each month collecting site photos and writing the owner’s progress report. It maps to the first activity on Gleeds’ list, and the PM can log it each month without a new system. Capture the hours on the last three monthly reports before the pilot, split into photo collection and writing. During the pilot, log the same split each month and record how many scheduled walks were completed. IN Site points out that areas the camera skips stay undocumented, so a missed walk shows up later as a gap in the record.

The other metrics below need a few weeks of baseline from mileage logs, calendars and the issue log.

Metrics to capture before piloting 360-degree reality capture on one job
Metric	Definition	Baseline to capture before the pilot
Progress report hours	Staff hours spent each month collecting site photos and writing the owner progress report	Hours logged on the last three monthly reports
Site trips for verification	Trips made only to check a condition or measure installed work	Count from mileage logs or calendars for the last 8 weeks
Days to close a field issue	Calendar days from an issue being logged to being closed	Median for issues closed in the last 8 weeks
Disputed conditions resolved from records	Share of disputed site conditions settled from existing photos without a new site visit	Count for the last 10 change events or back charges

Our post on NCC and Buildots shows how one contractor measured a 360-camera tool that compares captures with the schedule. If closeout is the target, pair this pilot with the document tracking in our post on Zutec Handover AI.

A first step on one job: ask the PM to log the hours spent on this month’s owner progress report, split into gathering photos and writing.

Availability and cost

OpenSpace sells two subscriptions, Core and Enterprise, priced by the customer’s annual construction volume. Enterprise adds single sign-on, access to OpenSpace’s APIs and extra onboarding. Progress tracking, sold as OpenSpace Track, is an add-on to either tier. OpenSpace says an annual subscription can cover a single project, and buyers get a price through its quote form. For a progress tracking product that lists a per-square-foot price, see our post on Track3D.