RM Online - What your customer needs to know about surveying equipment

While optical surveying and measuring equipment has the lion's share of the market, that is expected to shift dramatically within the next five years or so, as more and more laser products find their way not only to construction sites, but also into the DIY market. The rental industry is in a perfect position not only to benefit from this, but to help lead in educating potential customers.

"In the last five or six years, lasers have become commodity items that are indispensable to the surveying and measuring market," said Armand Motamed, president of LCI, Lasers for Construction, based in Hawthorne, Calif.

"More and more rental stores, contractors and DIYers are accepting lasers as prices drop and the knowledge spreads that they are easy to use and maintain," said Carmine Citro, general manager of Braintree, Mass.-based Berger Instruments, a division of Chicago Steel Tape (CST) Corp. "There's also a much wider variety with about 15 manufacturers in the business."

Typical applications for small contractors or DIYers include putting in decks and driveways, and installing suspended ceilings. "A homeowner can use the laser to level a ceiling off very easily for installing drop ceilings in a basement," Citro added.

The homeowner market for surveying and measuring devices really took off about five years ago when lasers also began selling to rental stores, Citro said.

With the advent of solid-state lasers versus the old cube-like lasers, designs of portable, battery-powered lasers have caused prices to drop dramatically. "A rotating laser for leveling work would have cost about $3,000 10 years ago. Today, a similar product sells for about $1,100," Motamed said.

With prices down to around $1,000, Motamed said the laser market is now poised to take on the market for optical equipment. The familiar scope surveying equipment on a tripod requires a person at the scope and another at a rod some distance away giving hand signals. This equipment is priced from a few hundred dollars up to $1,000.

"Lasers are making serious inroads to this market be-cause it only takes one person to operate. The automatic level always requires two people, so after labor costs are figured in, it could cost a customer more to use optical equipment than to use lasers," he said.

Inventory management and upkeep revolves around checking the calibration regularly. "The accuracy is so high that there are no good secondary measurement devices to check these things with," Motamed said.

"The best way to check the calibration is to put the laser on a flat surface, shoot a beam, turn the equipment around and shoot a beam again. You should hit the same point with both shots. If you don't, you need to adjust either the side-to-side screw or the left-to-right screw on the unit."

Still other new lasers are self-leveling and are priced close to the compensated lasers. The unit typically has a fail-safe feature that lets users know when it's out of level, according to Dennis House, advertising manager for Topcon Laser Systems in Pleasanton, Calif.

"Once the laser is set up, it takes readings and the sensors tell the user about certain activities like battery life or if the unit has been disturbed.

"If a rental store has been renting lasers for awhile, battery life is a big consideration, especially disposable versus rechargeable, the latter of which is a pain for rental stores or users. Now the industry is seeing more than 130 hours [of battery life] using four D-cell batteries," House said.

Other product innovations include a movement toward making lasers easier to use for inside applications, House said. Green lasers, as opposed to the usual red, are more visible to the human eye, so large contractors are really excited about these kinds of products.

While laser-measuring devices currently account for about 30 percent of the market, that is expected to shift to about 80 percent in the next five to seven years, Motamed said.

This is where the rental industry comes in. Prices are coming down, and more and more rental stores can afford to purchase the units for rental. And rental stores are in the best position to educate their customers about the benefits.

"We consider ourselves tool manufacturers, and we consider lasers as power tools, not laboratory instruments," Motamed said. "The key is to de-mystify the whole notion of lasers as these complicated instruments."

The key for rental professionals is to remember that the customer in this case is going to know what the laser does and why he wants to use it. The rental professional can present the program effectively and back up the equipment. "Applications are really only limited by the user's imagination," Motamed said.

Citro said that in general the leveling or grading industry has not really been emphasized by the rental industry, so there's untapped potential.

What's more, there is great potential for add-on sales, as well. Products like torpedo lasers, which are like a carpenter's level with a beam of light, could also be stocked by a rental store as a sales item for DIYers who just need to do basic leveling tasks. "They are too inexpensive to be worthwhile rental items, but they are great for add-on counter sales," Citro said. "You could also have an add-on sales display where you push measuring wheels, plump bobs and other accessories for leveling."