Cubi Casa - Now It Is Pretty Damn Good

[RCA]

One of Jeff's (Jeff Bradford's) acquaintances told me at this week's Nor-Cal Annual AI conference that you can now add wall thickness into your request for a floorplan to override the default 6" exterior and 4' interior wall thickness. And it has been a couple of years since I last tried it. So, I decided to give it another go.


I was surprised. I tried it on my house - and that is 3,000 sf with a number of rooms filled with so much junk - you really can't see where the floor meets the wall anywhere. It didn't seem to make much difference. It did great on the room dimensions (not perfect of course - but good enough). It could recognize most rooms on its own, including the Sauna. It got all windows save one correct, as well as doors. 6-hour turnaround.

I have ordered a DWG version so I can upload the floor plan into Chief Architect Home Designer Pro for final corrections. But that is considered a 3D extra - and that takes more than 6 hours to do - I guess more like 2-3 days. Will see. Once I get all the corrections done, I will order a 3D Doll House and Walk-through Video.

So, I plan on using this. It will definitely cut down the time to do appraisals - since I always did CAD floorplans.

I guess maybe, maybe I will do some more Fannie Mae appraisals for the hell of it. It will be interesting to see how much I can improve turnaround and still get the desired quality.

 

[George Hatch]

Interesting datapoint.

 

[Surf Cat]

maybe I will do some more Fannie Mae appraisals for the hell of it. It will be interesting to see how much I can improve turnaround and still get the desired quality.

Cubi Casa measures to ANSI standards?

 

[RCA]

Cubi Casa measures to ANSI standards?D

You can't rely on it to measure to ANSI - but:

1. Cubi Casa allows you to enter exterior and interior wall thickness on the initial request comments - which improves accuracy greatly.
2. You can pay $50 to get a CAD floorplan - which can be uploaded to something like Chief Architect's Home Designer Pro or AutoCad to make corrections - however, it is a longer wait to get the CAD file.

My plan is to try to get them to rush on the CAD .dwg plan. I will take my own exterior measurements to the 1/100th of a foot and garage measurements. I will rely on Cubi Casa for other interior measurements. That would be for GSE appraisals. This will save me a lot on the time it takes to do a CAD floorplan. So, even if I have to wait 3 days to get it (hopefully not), I will use that time for the other analysis and the CAD DWG will just be my bottleneck. So, until I get the DWG on my home and run it through the paces, I don't know for sure how it will work out -- but I am hopeful. For particularly large and complex interior homes, this will help greatly.

I will try to keep MARS models for all the major cities I appraise - updating them on down times, when there is slack. The model equations can be fed into a special MARS program to generate the Sales Grid for my RCA method. Or alternatively, I will just add the newer sales to the previous MLS dump and rerun the same existing program to get an updated model for a given city or possibly neighborhood.

I doubt, for the foreseeable future that I can get the turnaround on my appraisals much below 3 days. But that is better than my current turnaround and will definitely be less stressful. So, I should be able to lower my fees closer to what other appraisers are charging.

 

[alebrewer]

I've only run CC on a handfull of properties - primarily ones with functional obsolescence (so I can have the interior walls drawn systematically). My experience is that the CC calculated GLA is typically ~ 1-3% smaller than my calculations. Who knows, though - my 30 year old tape may be stretched by now...

 

[RCA]

I've only run CC on a handfull of properties - primarily ones with functional obsolescence (so I can have the interior walls drawn systematically). My experience is that the CC calculated GLA is typically ~ 1-3% smaller than my calculations. Who knows, though - my 30 year old tape may be stretched by now...

Did you measure the exterior and interior wall thickness and submit them in the request? They assume 6" and 4" for wall thickness. In this area, where there are numerous homes with 2x6 (really 2x5.5") construction, 6" for exterior walls would not be enough - and you would expect Cubi Casa to underestimate GLA. Some houses have less than 6" for exterior walls. -- But even with the corrections, we have the remaining problem that the interior wall thickness for bathrooms, the kitchen, and the garage is most likely greater than the standard wall thickness for the rest of the house. We often have double walls for plumbing and heating vents. Garage walls often have to be thicker per local code to provide extra safety against fire. So, the way around this would be to get the file as CAD and make minor corrections. In fact, you can make "quick corrections" with Cubi Casa after the download - but I haven't tried that yet.

 

[alebrewer]

Did you measure the exterior and interior wall thickness and submit them in the request? They assume 6" and 4" for wall thickness. In this area, where there are numerous homes with 2x6 (really 2x5.5") construction, 6" for exterior walls would not be enough - and you would expect Cubi Casa to underestimate GLA. Some houses have less than 6" for exterior walls. -- But even with the corrections, we have the remaining problem that the interior wall thickness for bathrooms, the kitchen, and the garage is most likely greater than the standard wall thickness for the rest of the house. We often have double walls for plumbing and heating vents. Garage walls often have to be thicker per local code to provide extra safety against fire. So, the way around this would be to get the file as CAD and make minor corrections. In fact, you can make "quick corrections" with Cubi Casa after the download - but I haven't tried that yet.

Yes. Of course the 'stretched tape' was levity. I also believe it has to do with differing wall thickness(es). It really is a pretty impressive app.

 

[djd09]

quit it with the infomercial

 

[Tom D]

i'm tech savy. looked at it. seemed very confusing to learn, not sure how you measured cluttered rooms so easily. just read their cautious rules.

 

[RCA]

i'm tech savy. looked at it. seemed very confusing to learn, not sure how you measured cluttered rooms so easily. just read their cautious rules.

I went through my house in one shot, and like I said a couple of the rooms were basically storage - you couldn't see where the floor met the wall anywhere in one fairly large room (it had a king size bed plus storage).

Now do you want to know how it could be done? Well, they have the iPhone Lidar measurements and video. They also have access to Google like aerials and street photos. They can get clues from many areas and they train the system to make inferences. If there is a conflict, the system is trained on how to make the best decisions. In the end, they come out with a decent estimate - that is surprising - much like ChatGPT surprises people. So, in fact, they may be using ChatGPT. Cubi Casa was developed in Finland and I think the Finns still manage development --- and they have a lot of good programmers in Scandinavia/Russia. It doesn't surprise me actually. But it is a lot of work.

As far as the "cautions" that you mention, of course, there are surely situations that throw it off. They say that the iPhone Lidar works outdoors and you can scan the outside of the house. But it is known that some wavelengths of sunlight are the same frequency as the wavelengths detected by iPhone Lidar. So, it can't be perfect - but on the other hand, with some programming, they could extract the video that has interference from that that doesn't and piece together the internal and external measurements.

And so the story I would say, is that Cubi Casa is maturing through continual programming that pulls in more clues about the structure of the house to mold into a consistent view. I am still waiting on my DWG and I will work on this more to come up with some decent numbers. But, for one thing, Cubi Casa can supposedly generate the CAD drawing - and it is easy enough to tweak in some CAD program, like Home Designer Pro.