Colin Gillis co-founded Smarter Spaces to do one thing: capture what a building actually looks like — not what the drawings say — and sell that truth to the people about to cut into it. The return on knowing is measurable. The cost of not knowing is also measurable, usually in change orders.
Every contractor in Atlantic Canada has been handed a set of drawings that turned out to be wrong. A wall is 2 inches off. A header is in the wrong spot. The MEP above the suspended ceiling is a spaghetti bowl nothing in the specs accounts for. And the industry has largely just accepted this as weather: "typically in construction you're in for 14 percent in overages no matter what and it's just kind of crazy how it's just accepted", Colin Gillis says.
Gillis is co-founder and CEO of Smarter Spaces Inc., a Halifax-based reality-capture firm that uses mobile 2D/3D LiDAR laser scanning to document buildings as they actually exist — not as they were designed. He and co-founder Dan MacIntosh started the company in 2016, after a decade running IPECC, a project management and construction consulting shop. They had watched, up close, how much renovation and fit-out cost gets swallowed by drawings that don't match reality. They decided to fix that specific problem.
The pitch is concrete. On a $10 million renovation project, bring Smarter Spaces in during the preliminary stage to capture existing conditions, and you cut the change-order budget roughly in half. "just by engaging us bringing us into update existing conditions we've reduced changers by about 50 so on a 10 million dollar project you're talking about 1.4 million", Gillis explains. Half of that 14%, recovered.
The most expensive ceiling in Atlantic Canada is the one nobody looked at
Change orders on standard renovation work hurt. Above-ceiling change orders on hospital work are their own category of pain. The MEP infrastructure concealed above hospital ceilings — existing ductwork, electrical, sprinkler mains, plumbing, fire suppression — is dense and complex, undocumented, and almost never matches the record drawings. Contractors who didn't scan it before tendering find out the hard way: "above ceiling or even worse would be like 75 percent over like it was just ridiculous how much gets pushed through because you don't know what's there".
Smarter Spaces built a response to this specific problem. Their 360-HDR camera platform documents above-ceiling space with a virtual-tour overlay that includes a reflected ceiling plan with radar overlay. Consultant teams working remotely can trace pipes, plan connections, and price work before anyone touches a tile. The Halifax Infirmary renovation demonstrated the approach at hospital scale.
The mobile LiDAR unit that does this work has one feature clients don't expect: it doesn't require the building to be empty. "the mobile lidar is you don't have to empty the office it doesn't take idef photography so it's great we used it in nursing homes and hospitals". In an occupied hospital, that's not a convenience — it's the difference between a feasible scope and a logistically impossible one.
New construction has the same problem — it just hides better
LiDAR isn't only for renovation. New-build work carries its own gap between design and reality, and it accumulates quietly. Geothermal pipe systems are one example: "from the original drawings to what we scanned and where they're actually located could be off by as much as 10 feet". A 10-foot deviation on a buried geothermal loop is not a framing issue you can shim. When a parking-lot repair later hits one of those pipes because nobody knew where it was, a $10,000 fix becomes a $500,000 repair.
Smarter Spaces addresses this by scanning mid-construction on two-week to monthly intervals, overlaying point clouds onto Revit/BIM models to catch clashes in real time rather than three months after the pour. Behind-wall and above-ceiling 360 scans before seal-up create a permanent record of what's buried: "if you can pull up on your phone unit 302 jump into that unit and see where all the pipes are located exactly what's above the ceiling". Maintenance teams years later can measure and trace from their phone.
The economics of that lifecycle data get vivid fast. "a sprinkler head if you knock a sprinkler head off in any type of damage is about ten thousand dollars a minute". A maintenance tech who can pull up the scan before drilling into a ceiling and locate exactly where the sprinkler heads are doesn't knock them. The scan pays for itself on the first avoided incident.
Historic facades get their own protocol. Smarter Spaces monitors structural shift on a bi-weekly scan cycle: "if it shifts a couple inches over two weeks then that's enough to say okay let's go check this out and shore it up". The digital baseline means shift is measurable, not estimated.
Selling a lifecycle argument is harder than selling a change-order reduction
Gillis is candid about which sale is easy and which is hard. The change-order reduction is a same-project win — you spend on the scan, you save on the overages, the math closes within the same budget cycle. The lifecycle maintenance argument requires a different kind of trust: "that's probably the toughest sellers is to spend up front to save five years from now".
The underlying challenge is communication, not technology. "really not about the technology it's about the value and the problems you solve". A scanning firm that leads with point-cloud specs loses. One that leads with what the client is actually paying for today, and what they'll stop paying for over the next decade, wins a different kind of conversation.
Smarter Spaces keeps its pipeline concentrated: 80% of revenue comes from existing clients, managed by co-founder Dan MacIntosh, who handles client relationships without a formal sales title. "existing clients are 80 of our business and he manages those relationships so he does a fabulous job there". New business comes in, but not by chasing every opportunity the technology could theoretically serve. "you've got to stop chasing squirrels sometimes so like there's cool things you could do but your target is mainly commercial construction". Deep expertise in one segment, not a shallow footprint across many.
Pre-construction virtual tours: the unit is sold before the shovel moves
The newest service line points to a different kind of value entirely. Smarter Spaces uses Revit models fed into Unity and Unreal Engine to produce pre-construction 3D virtual tours that let developers walk buyers through units that don't exist yet. The Margaretta (BANC Group) and The George (Alluvian Group) are among the Halifax projects where this has been deployed.
The commercial logic compounds quickly. "if you could pre-sell 80 of your units and know what kind of flooring you're going to use then you can place a bulk order". Pre-sold units mean committed material specifications mean bulk purchasing before construction begins — compressing supply-chain lead times when they matter most, at the start of a project. The next version of this is interactive finish customization inside the tour: buyers pick flooring and countertops, the developer captures commitments, and the bulk orders write themselves.
Regulatory demand doesn't go away
Fire-safety plan production and Rick Hansen accessibility certification auditing are both Smarter Spaces service lines, and both are compliance-driven. The Halifax auditor-general's office flagged uninspected buildings without current fire-safety plans — "we recognized that there was a large gap there and the auditor general from the city shone a big light on it" — and the National Building Code requires approved fire-safety plans for buildings with fire alarm systems. Nova Scotia's Accessibility Act pushes toward accessible-environment standards by 2030. Both create scheduled, recurring demand that doesn't depend on a developer's discretionary renovation budget.
The team behind the scanner
A 10+ person team is split between field collection and production, and the ratio matters for how the firm scales: "for every hour we're in the field there's probably three to four hours of production to turn that into a usable item". One field hire justifies two or three production hires. Production staff come largely from NSCC architectural technology and drafting programs, arriving Revit-literate: "at that point they both have skills in revit so for us it's really about the personality and the fit with our culture".
Post-COVID the team voted unanimously to stay remote, with daily huddles and monthly in-person events. "does anybody want to go back to the office the answer is no — productivity has really gone up". The field-and-production nature of the work meant most staff weren't in the office anyway; the vote formalized what was already true.
The growth target is $10 million in revenue, which requires expansion beyond Atlantic Canada. The path likely runs through national clients like Crombie REIT, which already operates across the country and has an established relationship with the firm.
If you're a building owner or developer in Atlantic Canada still writing change orders as a line in the pro forma: the technology that removes them is operating out of Halifax, it can scan while your building is occupied, and it's been doing this work since 2016.
The companies in this episode
Smarter Spaces Inc. — Halifax-based reality-capture firm using mobile 2D/3D LiDAR scanning to produce as-built drawings, 3D/BIM models, virtual tours, and construction QA/QC verification, plus fire-safety plans and accessibility audits for the AEC industry.
BANC Group of Companies — Halifax-based developer and manager of residential, mixed-use, and commercial real estate across Nova Scotia, including The Margaretta project that used Smarter Spaces' pre-construction virtual-tour service.
Crombie Real Estate Investment Trust — Canadian publicly traded REIT (TSX: CRR.UN), headquartered in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia; one of Smarter Spaces' national clients and a likely path for the firm's expansion beyond Atlantic Canada.
Guest: Colin Gillis, BBA, MCPM, Co-founder & CEO, Smarter Spaces Inc.. Episode 27 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Rick Hansen 2030 accessibility mandate: rickhansen.com. Halifax fire-safety compliance gap: NS Auditor General, 2023.