There’s a WSJ-sourced story in the Business section of the Gannett Star this morning (paper edition; I don’t see the story online) extolling the virtues of online photographic maps (e.g., Google Earth). The lede is
When a customer recently inquired about roofing five apartment buildings, Jay Saber didn’t bother to drive out to take the measurements.
Saber, the owner of Saber Roofing in Redwood City, Calif., instead punched the addresses into Google’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 e-mailed the estimate to the client the next day.
The software saved Saber a roughly 350-mile round trip to see the roofs in person.
There are two, no, three, reasons why I would never have this man’s company re-roof my house.
1) Pictures on Google Earth (and other aerial photo sites) are often 2-3 years out of date. How do you “eyeball” the current condition of my roof based on an old photo? Yeah, I know the article goes on to say “While the aerial images can be as much as a few years old, things such as roofs and the areas of lawns generally don’t change much over that period of time.” I call bullshit; you can’t tell the true current condition of a roof by just looking at a picture of its top layer. And if the picture is out of date, even more so.
2) And besides that, how can you zoom in close enough to get the kind of detail you need to really see the condition? I realize that some of these photos are wicked sharp, but the detail just isn’t really there for what this gent is trying to do.
3) Perhaps most importantly, if you don’t have the time or inclination to make a personal contact for a $100K+ job, to hell with you and the horse you rode in on. The computer does not replace a handshake, nor does it replace a little crawling around on the roof and in the attic to make sure you aren’t woefully underbidding the job due to underlying defects that you can’t SEE in a photo. The last thing I would want to hear is “Well, our original estimate was out by about half, because we didn’t know about the dry rot in the attics” or whatever.