How a Halifax Developer Marketed Unfinished Office Space With a Walkable 3D Tour

Case Studies2026.10.127 min read

A Halifax developer leased offices mid-renovation using walkable 3D tours captured with XGRIDS PortalCam and processed in LCC for pre-completion leasing.

At a Glance

Property	Permanent Buildings, Halifax town centre, UK. 19th-century building under redevelopment.
Use mix	Floors 1–4 office; ground floor retail or hospitality unit
Floor area	4,920 sqm (floors 1–4)
Capture provider	ClearPath360 (Chris Miles)
End client / developer	OCMS
Hardware	PortalCam
Software	LCC (Lixel CyberColor)
Deliverable	Walkable 3D tours, captured at multiple stages across the renovation.

Bringing a Historic Halifax Building Back Into Commercial Use

Halifax’s town centre still runs on the buildings its 19th-century industry left behind. Bringing one back into use, rather than clearing the site, keeps the centre working. Permanent Buildings is one of these: a period property being brought back as offices above a ground-floor retail or hospitality unit.

Reopening a historic building as commercial space is rarely a single clean handover. The work is phased and the uses are mixed. The developer has to let the offices while the building is still a working site.

That timing is where the commercial pressure sits. A finished building with no tenants earns nothing, so a developer wants tenants lined up as the work wraps up, not months after. The catch: this means asking a tenant to choose a space they cannot yet walk, in a building that changes week to week.

Marketing Commercial Space Before the Fit-Out Is Finished

The developer needed to lease those offices while the building was still an active site. This is the hard part of marketing commercial space mid-redevelopment: the floors an agent has to let are the floors that are not finished yet.

Fixed-point photos and video can show a completed show floor. They cannot help a prospective tenant judge an unfinished one. And they date every time the site changes.

Reality Capture Across a Live Renovation With PortalCam

ClearPath360 captured Permanent Buildings with PortalCam at several points across the renovation. Each capture was processed through LCC into a walkable 3D tour.

Site operative in a hi-vis vest capturing an unfinished office floor with PortalCam for 3d property modeling

The primary job was leasing. Prospective tenants could move through unfinished floors in first person via a web listing. They could read the space, the sightlines, and how the floors connect. Leasing ran alongside construction instead of waiting for practical completion.

Empty refurbished office floor with glass partitions and exterior scaffolding, presented as a real estate virtual tour

The same link could be sent to colleagues who were not in Halifax, so a decision didn’t have to wait on getting everyone to site. Conversations that would usually hold until a space was finished and presentable could begin while the building was still scaffolded.

Four things the walkable model does that a photo gallery can’t:

Show a floor before it’s finished. Tenants walk unfinished space in first person and judge whether it works for them. Leasing starts during the build, not at handover.
Close with a tenant who never visits. One link lets a decision-maker in another city, or their whole team, size up the space for themselves. A lease can progress without a trip to Halifax.
Measure the space without going back. Distances and areas come straight off the model. A tenant, designer, or contractor can test a fit-out or headcount against real dimensions, all working from the same reference.
Let the tenant plan their fit-out. The LCC model retains accurate dimensions and spatial relationships, providing a practical basis for early fit-out planning. In SketchUp, tenants and designers can test different office layouts, compare desks and furniture against the available space, and explore how a particular interior style could work within the building. Decisions are made around the space’s actual proportions, circulation, and capacity—not a blank floor plan.

Distance measurement taken between a glass partition and the core wall in the LCC model, used for as built drawings

Long bench desks laid into the captured office floor to test a dense fit-out in architectural visualization software

Would a Scandinavian-style office work in this space?

Green task chairs, planting and a breakout seating area tested in the captured floor using 3d rendering software

How about a different style?

Before and after view of the break room, empty on the left and with a four-seat table added in the 3d scans on the right

Would a four-person table work in the break room?

One Walkable 3D Tour, Used Across the Project Lifecycle

The walkable record was made for leasing. Once it existed, the developer and its contractors reused it without commissioning anything new.

Repeat captures gave the team a dated 3D record of the building’s state. They could check progress and time scaffold removal without another site visit. That included facade areas otherwise hidden behind the scaffold.

Scaffold walkway beside the sandstone facade, captured by repeat 3d scanning to track renovation progress

Operator recording a stripped-out room with stained glass windows and exposed brick, a cultural preservation reference

The period interiors, including the ballroom, were also recorded as a heritage reference. The building’s original character stays retrievable once the renovation has moved past it.

Zoomed view of the sandstone facade and window surrounds behind the scaffold in the LCC digital twin software model

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do You Market a Commercial Property That’s Still Under Construction?

Capture the space as it stands with a mobile scanner and publish it as a walkable 3D tour. Prospective tenants can move through unfinished floors online and judge scale and layout, so leasing conversations can start before practical completion rather than waiting for it.

What Is a Walkable 3D Tour, and How Does It Differ From a 360 Virtual Tour?

A walkable 3D tour lets a viewer move continuously through a captured space in any direction. It is built from 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), which reconstructs the scene as an immersive, navigable model rather than a set of fixed photo positions linked by jumps, and does not warp the scene at different angles. A 360 virtual tour places the viewer at set points and moves them between those points, which breaks the continuous sense of scale as you move.

Can a Building Be Captured While Scaffolding Is Still Up?

Yes. Repeat captures during construction record the building’s changing state and can show facade areas before scaffold removal, giving the developer and contractors a dated reference for progress and scaffold-timing decisions.

How Is a Heritage Building Documented in 3D?

The interior is scanned and reconstructed as a 3D model that preserves the spatial character of period features, keeping them retrievable as a reference independent of any later renovation work.

See the Tours

Permanent Buildings

Scaffolding Sections

Westgate Phase II

Westgate Phase II

About XGRIDS

XGRIDS is a spatial intelligence company. It reconstructs real places at engineering-grade accuracy so professionals, everyday users, and the AI that learns from these spaces can work from the same data. Hardware covers spatial scanners (Lixel L series and K series) and spatial cameras (PortalCam). Software includes LixelStudio and LCC. Products are in use with 8,000+ customers across 80+ countries. The open LCC format is used in the NVIDIA Isaac Sim official workflow. Customers capture, process, and export in the device and local software. XGRIDS supplies the hardware and local tools. It does not provide surveying services, and does not access or retain project data.

Bridge Reality. Build Digital Worlds.

Media Contact

media@xgrids.com

https://www.xgrids.com/intl

XGRIDS provides hardware capture devices and local software tools only, and does not provide surveying/mapping services. All data is captured, stored, processed, and exported by the user; XGRIDS does not participate in on-site capture and does not access, control, or retain any user project data or deliverables.