Selling a BIM business

BIM company for sale? Settle the models before the buyer asks

Updated 2026-10-27

When a BIM consultancy or content studio is sold, the models are a large part of what the buyer pays for. The sale is when you find out which platforms will hand them back and who owns them.

Ask about my BIM archive

Will the platforms return the models at the end?

3 of the 16 BIM platforms on our board name a number of days: Catenda lets a customer export in a machine-readable format for ninety days after termination, and Revizto makes customer data available for electronic retrieval for ninety days. 6 promise no export at all.

Source: BIM software data terms

Who owns the models you are selling?

In the UK, copyright in a work an employee makes in the course of employment belongs first to the employer, and an assignment is effective only in writing signed by the assignor. In the US, a work made for hire belongs to the employer, and a transfer is valid only in a signed writing.

Source: BIM model ownership law

Is anyone else already using the data?

Trimble's Tekla online terms let it disclose aggregated data derived from customer content to third parties, and Plannerly may generate aggregated or anonymized data from customer data. A buyer will ask which of these rights sit over the archive.

Source: BIM software data terms

Which buyers license a firm's data for training?

Most organisations on our buyer board license company workflows rather than models. Troveo says ownership never transfers and it licenses on terms the owner signs off; Maryah says a licence grants rights to use the data, not ownership, and that you must hold the rights to license it.

Source: BIM data buyers

The full clause board is on the home page, and the rights behind a model are on BIM copyright.

Describe the BIM archive you hold

7 of the 16 BIM platforms we read keep a right over aggregated customer data. Tell us where your models sit and we will write back about them.

Your models

What is most of the archive?

Project models from our own design work Revit families or BIM objects we built and sell Models we made for manufacturers' product libraries Scan-to-BIM and as-built models
Where does most of it sit today?

A person reads every BIM enquiry
No BIM platform named here is told what you send
We never ask for client names or project addresses

Sources

This site's own datasets, every figure quoted from its source and dated:

Who takes building models and 3D data for AI training: 1 of 11 organisations whose pages we read name 3D models, CAD or spatial data among what they take, read 27 October 2026.
The Bim Model Ownership Law carries 3 published figures read from 3 sources' own pages, from 70 to 95 year, read 27 October 2026.
Bim software data terms: 7 of 16 bim software vendors whose terms we read reserve the right to use their customers' data in aggregated or anonymised form, read 27 October 2026.

Find out what your BIM archive can be licensed as