October 28, 2026 More Than a Live Feed: How Construction Cameras Create a Visual Record of the Jobsite

When Hunt Midwest began taking on more projects outside its home market of Kansas City, its construction team faced a practical challenge: the projects were getting farther away, but the team still needed to know what was happening on them.

There are only so many site visits you can make.

Depending on the project and stage of construction, Hunt Midwest’s team might visit a remote site every two weeks or once a month. Work continues in between. Crews move, weather changes and questions come up whether someone from the development team is standing there or not.

Construction cameras help the team stay connected between those visits.

Michael Knight, Senior Vice President of Construction Management at Hunt Midwest, said his construction managers use EarthCam’s cameras every day. He’ll walk by their offices and see project imagery pulled up while they’re working.

On one project in Savannah, Georgia, the view extends roughly three-quarters of a mile down a roadway. Instead of calling someone on site to ask what’s happening at the other end, the team can often just look.

“There’s a lot of correspondence that you don’t have to take time to implement with emails or phone calls,” Knight said. “You can see what’s happening right in front of you.”

Sometimes that’s all a project manager needs. But Hunt Midwest has found that the imagery can become even more useful after that moment has passed.

Going back to see what actually happened

Consider a weather delay.

Weather data might show that it rained. A contractor’s progress report might explain how that affected the schedule. The visual record can add another layer: what the site actually looked like afterward.

Was there standing water? How long did the ground take to dry? When did conditions improve enough for work to resume?

Hunt Midwest has gone back through its camera archives to answer those kinds of questions during discussions about project delays. Knight said the team has reviewed site conditions after rain and even looked back to see when snow melted.

“We can actually track the physical conditions of the site and not just have to believe a progress report from a contractor,” he said.

The imagery doesn’t replace those reports. It gives the team another record to compare against them. Knight described it as a way to “connect some of the dots that don’t always get detailed in those progress reports.”

The archive can also become useful for reasons nobody anticipated when the images were captured. Hunt Midwest has reviewed footage around security issues and after-hours activity, and the team has returned to the visual record after construction when questions arose about something that may have happened earlier in the project.

That is one of the challenges of documenting a long construction project. Teams don’t always know today what they’ll need to verify six months from now.

“I think once they can go back to some of these recordings, they’re going to find value in some of the information that they don’t even know they’re going to find value [in],” Knight said.

Different projects require different views

Hunt Midwest’s portfolio also shows why there isn’t one standard way to visually document a jobsite.

KCI 29, located near Kansas City International Airport, covers about 3,300 acres and has capacity for as much as 20 million square feet of development. Roadways, infrastructure projects, building pads and vertical construction are spread across a large area.

One camera can’t capture all of it. Distances and tree lines limit visibility, while multiple parts of the property may be active simultaneously. Hunt Midwest uses multiple views to follow work across the site.

The Hudson presented a different challenge.

On the tighter site, Hunt Midwest wasn’t only concerned with activity inside the construction area. Street circulation, project access and the effect of construction on surrounding traffic also mattered.

Those differences are why Hunt Midwest starts considering camera placement early. Around the building-permit stage, Knight’s team is already thinking about what they need to see, where cameras should go and how many might be necessary. Ideally, they’re operating by the time clearing is finished.

Starting early also creates something that can’t be reconstructed later: a visual record of the project from the beginning.

One project, multiple audiences

Construction managers aren’t the only people looking.

Knight said Hunt Midwest’s CFO uses the cameras. Lenders may be interested in the imagery during draw reviews. Tenants and clients can have access. On the Hudson, development partners who weren’t construction professionals also wanted to follow the project’s progress.

“They don’t have to take our word for it for the progress and the progress reports,” Knight said. “It just shows another level of transparency.”

Those stakeholders aren’t necessarily looking for the same thing.

A construction manager might examine a specific area of work while a lender, executive or tenant simply wants to understand how far the project has progressed. Each can see the same project without requiring the construction team to create a separate update every time someone wants to check in.

For Hunt Midwest, that visibility has become particularly valuable as the company expands into new markets.

Knight summarized the approach in three words: “Trust but verify.”

The company still relies on contractors, vendors and design teams, and its construction managers still visit jobsites. The cameras extend that visibility into the days and weeks between those visits.

“We feel like we have the thumb on the project using the EarthCams,” Knight said. “It gives us a whole new level of confidence to expand our business into other markets.”

A growing visual record creates a new challenge

The longer a camera stays on a project, the larger its history becomes.

That makes the archive more valuable, but potentially harder to navigate. Finding something from last Tuesday is one thing. Finding a specific event from eight months ago, particularly when nobody remembers exactly when it happened, is another.

Knight sees that as one of the next opportunities for construction technology.

Projects already generate enormous amounts of information across daily reports, schedules, cost reports, lending documents, drawings, photos and jobsite imagery. The challenge isn’t simply collecting more of it. It’s making that information easier to use.

AI and visual search can help teams work with the history they’ve already captured. Instead of manually moving through months of imagery, teams can search for specific activities, conditions or events. As those capabilities develop, the visual record can also become more closely connected with the other project information teams already use.

Knight is particularly interested in what that could mean for labor-intensive reporting processes.

“I really look forward to technology evolving to consolidate those efforts in the future,” he said. “I think that takes a lot of time where it’s kind of laborious. It’s been done the same way for many years, and that’s about to change.”

For construction teams, the opportunity isn’t another source of information. It’s a better way to find and use what’s already there.

The value beyond the live view

Near the end of the conversation, Knight was asked what a construction team misses if it only uses its cameras to watch the live feed.

“I think they’re missing the full evolution of the project, of the day, of the week, of the month.”

The live view remains valuable. Hunt Midwest’s construction managers use it every day to answer immediate questions and stay connected to distant jobsites.

The archive serves a different purpose.

Construction unfolds over months and years, through changing site conditions, weather delays, schedule adjustments and thousands of everyday decisions. A moment that seems routine when it happens can become important months later when someone needs to understand what changed, when it changed or what conditions looked like at a particular point in the project.

For Hunt Midwest, capturing those moments has created more than a way to see what’s happening today. It has created a visual history the team can return to when today’s project questions become tomorrow’s.