Sign InDisaster Restoration Mitigation: How 3D Models Help You Restore Smarter and Reduce Future Risk
In 2025, 23 climate disasters in the U.S. totalled $115 billion in damages. Research from Allstate and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce puts the cost of not preparing for them in sharper terms: every $1 invested in preparedness saves $13 in recovery costs.
It’s too easy to leave that $13 on the table. Not because teams don't care about mitigation, but because they're working without a record of what they're rebuilding from. 3D models give you that record, and with it, the documentation to recover faster and the spatial evidence to build back stronger.
This article covers how 3D models support better disaster restoration mitigation at every stage, from pre-loss documentation that surfaces vulnerabilities to a post-restoration baseline that makes the next loss cheaper to recover from.
What is restoration mitigation?
Disaster restoration mitigation is the process of restoring a property after a loss while building in improvements that reduce the risk of the same thing happening again.
Standard restoration returns a space to pre-loss condition.
Restoration mitigation asks what can be upgraded during the rebuild to prevent a repeat.
Restoration mitigation can look like:
Upgrading an entire membrane to add better drainage from a roof, rather than just repairing a failed section.
Rerouting water pipelines away from sensitive equipment and upgrading to freeze-resistant materials, rather than just replacing a burst pipe.
Upgrading to moisture-resistant board and improving drainage after a flood, rather than replacing drywall with the same standard material.
The concept is beneficial across all stakeholders. Risk managers protecting a portfolio, insurers evaluating long-term exposure, and facilities professionals responsible for uptime all have a stake in whether recovery also means risk reduction.
How to turn disaster restoration into a continuous risk-reduction cycle
Disaster restoration mitigation is a cycle where each stage builds on the last. Let’s walk through what that process looks like in practice.
Preserve a complete spatial record of your property for risk protection
A 3D model gives you a dimensionally accurate record of your property. It's the foundation for every downstream risk assessment and mitigation decision that follows. Without it, every stakeholder involved in a future loss starts from scratch.
What to capture first depends on what you manage. Here's a breakdown by property type, focusing on the areas that carry the most risk:
Residential real estate: Roof structure, basement, electrical panel, HVAC unit, and water heater are the most common failure points in homeowner claims.
Commercial real estate (CRE): Tenant improvement zones, shared mechanical areas, loading docks, roof access points, and common area infrastructure. These areas impact both cost exposure and coordination complexity across tenants and service contracts.
Facilities/industrial: Mechanical rooms, electrical rooms and risers, high-value equipment zones, shutoff locations, and access paths. Failures here can halt operations.
A navigable, room-by-room walkthrough preserves the spatial relationships between assets and structural elements that scattered photos lose. An adjuster reviewing a folder of 200 JPEGs can't tell how far the water heater sits from the electrical panel or whether the crawl space connects to the affected area. A 3D model can.
Matterport's Pro3 camera uses LiDAR precision to capture millions of measurements per scan, producing detailed 3D models called digital twins. These are accurate enough for the complex environments that bear the heaviest risk.
During walkthroughs, teams can mark areas of interest in real time using Tags, even offline. Once the model is processed, you can pin mitigation guidance, link to equipment manuals and shutoff SOPs directly inside the model, turning it into a living operations reference rather than a static visual record.
Identify vulnerabilities and prioritize interventions before damage spreads
A 3D model is a useful foundation for running risk assessments based on real spatial relationships. By reviewing the model remotely, you can accurately identify vulnerabilities and decide which to address first based on severity, likelihood, and downtime.
Dimensionally accurate 3D models support several kinds of risk review:
Flood-prone zones: Ground-floor tenant spaces near drainage infrastructure show up in the model with enough spatial context to trace how water would travel through connected common areas and where it would pool.
Structural and envelope weak points: Facade deterioration, failing window seals, and roof sections showing wear are all captured with enough detail to give engineers and underwriters something to work from.
High-value asset exposure: From shared mechanical systems near a known water table to HVAC and electrical equipment in flood-risk zones, you can measure precisely how close assets sit to the risk source.
Clearances and access paths: You can verify egress routes and equipment clearances directly in the model without scheduling a return visit to the site.
The spatial clarity that a digital twin brings to the table is what moves the conversation from general risk awareness to a specific intervention scheduled before a loss event forces one.
Enable faster coordination for claims and restoration teams
After a disaster, multiple parties, from adjusters to contractors and insurers, need to agree on what was damaged, what needs restoring, and what improvements to build in. That alignment typically requires multiple site visits, each one eating into the recovery timeline.
Cloud-hosted 3D models solve this coordination problem in three ways:
One model for virtual walkthroughs. Share a single link and everyone is able to see the same space from any device, anywhere.
Remote navigation and action. Stakeholders can navigate to tagged areas, verify measurements, confirm access paths, and assign next actions without traveling to the site.
Pre-mitigation briefings. Run planning sessions using the model instead of pulling every stakeholder on-site at once.
Matterport's Automated Measuring generates room-by-room dimensions directly from the digital twin without anyone returning to the site. Any stakeholder with access to the model can verify spatial data remotely, which removes a whole category of back-and-forth that typically stalls coordination. Matterport Sketch builds on that capability by automatically producing annotated floor plans with precise dimensions in minutes after capture, ready to move directly into the next stage of the response.
For ATI Restoration, coordination costs were a measurable drag on every disaster response. Site travel alone ran an average of $13,190.71 per associate per year, a figure that compounds fast across a large response team.
After deploying Matterport, ATI increased productivity by 500% and accelerated insurance claim estimation by an average of 400%. For each estimator, that translates to more than $100,000 in annual labor savings.
Accelerate restoration and improvements with exportable outputs
When restoration crews arrive on site, the most important decisions aren’t about what was damaged. That's already established. They're about what gets rebuilt differently. Without a pre-loss baseline, there's no spatial context to inform that call, so crews default to replacing what was there.
A pre-loss digital twin gives crews that context, and travels with the job through exportable file formats:
Schematic floor plans (PNG, PDF, SVG) give contractors a working reference on site.
MatterPak bundles and E57 point clouds support field teams managing complex or multi-phase jobs.
BIM and Revit files let architects and engineers plan improvements against an accurate as-built rather than a sketch.
Dalworth Restoration runs this workflow on every job. When the company receives a call, it captures the space with the Matterport camera, uploads the scan to the Matterport Cloud, and uses the 3D model to assess the damage.
"By sharing the Matterport 3D models with stakeholders, we've reduced the number of inquiries and disputes from insurance adjusters, building consultants, and owners." - Nick Hobbs, Dalworth Restoration’s Mitigation Manager
Document improvements and establish a stronger baseline for future claims
Without a post-restoration scan, the improvements you made during recovery don’t officially exist for the next adjuster, contractor, or underwriter. Rescanning the property after restoration captures your new, improved state. The next time something happens, you're working from a stronger baseline.
Disaster-driven restoration isn’t the only event that should trigger an update, though. You should rescan after:
Any physical change to the space: New equipment installations, tenant build-outs, system reroutes, or material upgrades all alter the baseline. If it's not in the model, it doesn't exist for insurance purposes.
Any incident or near-miss that reveals a previously undocumented vulnerability: A small leak that didn't trigger a claim still exposes a risk worth documenting. Capture it before it becomes a full loss.
Scheduled cadence based on risk profile: High-risk facilities (those in flood zones, older buildings, or properties with complex MEP systems) benefit from annual or semi-annual rescans. Lower-risk properties might update every two to three years.
Comparing scans over time surfaces emerging risks, such as gradual settlement, wear on roof membranes, or moisture staining that wasn't present in the last capture. Catching these changes early reduces reactive maintenance costs and gives underwriters better data to work with.
The Tags Import/Export plug-in carries risk annotations forward across scan cycles, so teams don't restart documentation from scratch after each rescan. If you tagged every shutoff valve and known vulnerability in the original model, those annotations transfer to the updated twin automatically.
Closing the restoration mitigation loop with digital twins
Disaster restoration mitigation isn’t a one-time project. Each pass through it makes the next loss smaller and the recovery faster. 3D digital twins support every stage of that cycle, helping you:
Document your property before a loss with a dimensionally accurate, time-stamped baseline.
Use that record to identify vulnerabilities and coordinate more efficiently across stakeholders.
Restore with improvements that lower future risk, not just like-for-like replacements.
Rescan to set a stronger baseline that reflects your upgraded state.
The teams that run this cycle consistently spend less on emergency repairs and recover faster every time. Whether you manage a single facility or a distributed portfolio, the pattern is the same: better documentation before a loss leads to smarter recovery after one.
Request a demo to learn more about how Matterport's digital twins support pre-loss documentation and more efficient restoration.
