Records from design and building firms, on terms you set

Design and building firms keep a long written trail of how a project went from drawing to handover:

• Drawing sets and models, with each revision
• Submittals and RFIs between designers and trades
• Change orders and the logs that coordinate them
• Bids and estimates, plus subcontractor comparisons
• Punch lists and daily logs

Your estimates show how you price work. If you prefer to keep that private, exclude the estimating files. In whatever remains, owner, subcontractor, supplier and site names become placeholders, and so do addresses.

Any job with restricted drawings or site details for security reasons can be excluded completely. Mark them once, and they stay out of the copy.

Certain drawings and models are owned by the building owner or restricted by contract. Those can be excluded project by project. It is for you and your lawyers to judge whether any of them suit your contracts. We do not give legal advice about it.

Begin with the estimate. On the short call, name the platforms that hold your project history and the jobs that must stay out. Preparation waits until the list is settled with you. A sample comes to you before anything is shared, and the originals stay in your systems. Passwords are never requested.

Only the approved project material reaches a buyer, as a prepared copy. One typical item follows an RFI through its response, the resulting change and the new drawing, with each owner, trade and site replaced. Hundreds of resolved questions of this kind are what make building records useful to AI labs. Nothing touches the project files in daily use, and no one ever needs a way into your project software.