The 3D asset that doesn't depreciate when you hand over the building

There's an accounting decision almost nobody discusses that defines what a 3D production is really worth: whether it's booked as marketing spend or as an asset.

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The problem with treating it as an expense

Physical models, renders and video get budgeted inside the sales effort. They do their job during pre-sales and, on handover day, their book value is zero. The model gets thrown out or stacked in a warehouse.

With a digital twin that logic need not apply, because the file you used to sell is the same one that runs the building. But that only happens if you build it that way from the start.

A case with concrete numbers

When BMO acquired Bank of the West, it inherited 503 branches that had to be redesigned and rebranded. The traditional route was sending architects and planners to survey each one.

Instead they generated digital twins of every branch through 3D capture. According to the case published by Matterport, they modeled all 503 in three months and saved close to 6,000 survey hours — roughly twelve per branch — plus over US$500,000 in fifteen months on travel and site visits.

That saving didn't come from selling better. It came from not having to go.

From sales model to operating model

The transition isn't automatic, but the path is clear: the same geometric model the buyer walked through connects to the building's sensors and becomes the interface for operations. Consumption by zone, maintenance, occupancy of shared areas.

The sales asset is reborn as the building's nervous system.

For whoever manages the property, the advantage is an exact digital topography without surveying it again: the basis for assessing efficiency, planning refurbishments and meeting ever stricter environmental rules.

A caveat about return

Here it pays to be honest, because the industry abuses ROI figures. Autodesk surveyed 71 senior real estate decision-makers and interviewed 14 experts across the Americas, EMEA and APAC, and found something uncomfortable: most believe digital twins create value, but struggle to prove it quantitatively.

That doesn't mean they don't. It means you have to decide what you'll measure before you start: survey hours avoided, visits not made, committee time. If it isn't defined up front, the saving happens and nobody records it.

That's the criterion behind every digital twin we build: that the file serves after handover, and that everyone knows from day one what's being measured.

Sources

Matterport — BMO accelerates branch transformation at more than 500 locations · Autodesk — Unlocking value in real estate operations with digital twins