Survey and mapping firms at sale
Selling a surveying business? What the archive is worth first
A survey practice sold as a going concern often hands its archive to the buyer with the client list. Part of that archive may be licensable to AI developers before the sale, and part may never have been the firm's to sell.
Sort the archive by where it came from
Captured by your own crews: measured surveys, flights and scans. Built on someone else's map: layers traced from a basemap or derived from Ordnance Survey data. Only the first is yours to license without asking anyone.
Check the platforms it sits in
12 of 17 GIS platforms on our board say uploaded content stays with the customer. Esri makes content available to download for 30 days after a cloud service ends, and DroneDeploy for 30 days if you ask in time, so take the archive out before you hand over any account.
Source: GIS software data terms
Licence, sale or closure
A firm still working licenses a copy of its archive and keeps it. A firm being sold can license before completion or leave it to the buyer. A firm winding down leaves the decision with its directors only while nobody is appointed and no winding-up petition is before the court, because if the court then winds the firm up, a sale made after the petition is void unless the court orders otherwise: once a liquidator takes office, in a solvent members' winding up too, the directors' powers end and the liquidator sells, and in an administration the administrator does. After the firm is dissolved, what it still owned goes to the Crown, so nobody who ran it can sell the archive then. Start on the enquiry form.