Handover usually means archiving. A model is produced, delivered, and filed somewhere nobody opens again. The building carries on being operated from spreadsheets and email while the most accurate record anyone ever made of it sits in a format only the consultant who produced it can actually read.
Uploading it changes what the model is for. It stops being a deliverable that discharged an obligation and starts being the working record of the building — the thing you open to answer a question on a Tuesday afternoon, rather than the thing you keep on a drive in case somebody one day asks for it.
IFC, Revit .rvt, DXF and STEP all go in through the same door, which matters because most owners have some mixture of them rather than one clean set. A Revit file converts on the way in and comes back as a live twin, and the semantics survive the trip: types, storeys and properties, not just the triangles of a mesh.
Size is rarely the obstacle people expect it to be. Portfolio-scale federated models run in an ordinary browser tab, and very heavy sets are baked once into a fast view — a 143 MB model reopens from about 11 MB after that, which is the difference between a model you check and a model you avoid.
The real reason most owners cannot use the model they paid for is licensing, not capability. The software costs money, the training costs more, and the person who genuinely knows the building — the maintenance lead, the area manager — is almost never the person holding the seat.
Opening the twin in a browser removes that constraint completely. Every stakeholder gets a link instead of a licence, which is the practical difference between a model three specialists can open and a model the whole team actually works from during a refit.
What arrives with the model is the useful part rather than the pretty part. Rooms resolve by name, elements can be selected and read, and quantities come off the geometry rather than being estimated from a printed plan by somebody who was not there.
It also means the model stops decaying. A file that is opened is a file that gets corrected; a file that is archived drifts out of date silently, and the first person to discover the drift is usually a contractor who has already started work.
And it stays yours. Export back to IFC whenever you like, including after you stop paying, and Revit will read it through its own IFC import. A twin you cannot take with you is not a record of your building, it is a subscription to somebody else's copy of it.
For a new building this is the moment to do it, while the model is current and the people who produced it are still reachable to answer questions. Six months after practical completion the same upload is still worth doing, but the free clarification is gone.
For an older building the same logic applies from the day you inherit it. Whatever exists — a full BIM model, a folder of DXFs, a scanned drawing set — is the best record that will ever exist of that building, and it is worth turning into something openable before the next person leaves.