How Canary shipped editable floor plans with tldraw

Canary Inc. is an innovative tech leader in Japan's rental market. It runs CANARY, a room-search app, and CANARY Cloud, a suite of SaaS tools for real estate companies, including a CRM that brokerages use to manage inquiries, follow-ups, viewings and listings. More than 1,000 real estate agencies use its listing platform.

Canary added a floor plan editor to CANARY Cloud, allowing real estate agents to drag in rooms, snap walls together, automatically calculate room sizes, and export the finished plan as a clean image ready for the listing.

Here's how they built it with tldraw in about a month.

The problem

For rental brokerages in Japan, floor plans are daily work. Practically every listing needs one, and agents produce them as part of their routine.

That made a floor plan tool a migration problem for Canary. Agencies moving to CANARY Cloud from competitor systems needed to keep producing floor plans without interruption. A missing floor plan tool was "a real reason to stay put," says Shota Miyahara, a Software Engineer at Canary.

Canary set two goals for the feature: remove that blocker for agencies switching over, and make day-to-day work easier for existing customers.

Why tldraw

Before committing, the team ran proofs of concept across three candidate libraries (tldraw, Excalidraw and dgm.js) and tested each against its internal floor plan spec. tldraw came out on top.

The SDK covered the parts of a canvas that take the longest to get right:

• Custom shapes – Each room, wall, door or fixture is its own type of shape. Agents can select, move, rotate and resize any of them without Canary writing that behavior.
• Custom tools – Canary built its own tools for drawing rooms and walls, measuring, and scaling a traced drawing, on top of tldraw's standard tools.
• Undo and redo – Mistakes are one click from fixed, with nothing extra to build.
• Zoom and pan – Moving around a large plan works out of the box.
• Pages – Each floor of a building is its own page, so agents switch floors with a tab.
• Image export – The finished plan exports as an image using tldraw's built-in export.

That left the team free to focus on the floor plan itself. After proofs of concept starting in mid-June 2026, the team began building on September 1 and launched on October 2. It only took one month of development.

Without both tldraw and AI-assisted development, the team estimates the editor could easily have taken more than six months.

"Building our own canvas would have lost us at least another quarter. tldraw let us ship a full floor plan editor in about a month and focus on what matters to Japanese rental agents." — Ryota Takayama, VP of Engineering, Canary

The solution

The editor allows agents to go to market faster by creating custom floor plans for every listing.

"We were able to make the design feel very Canary. It's easy to find everything, and it's really easy to use." — CANARY Cloud customer

Canary built eight types of custom shapes, including rooms, walls, doors, windows and fixtures, dimension lines, text and images, then layered the floor plan workflow on top. Agents start with a library of more than 100 drag-and-drop parts, including Western- and Japanese-style rooms. Bring two rooms close and their walls snap together. Doors fit neatly into walls, and L-shaped rooms and curved walls are fully supported.

"There's a huge range of room and wall parts, and you can even pick a different wall type for each edge. I was genuinely impressed." — Canary employee

For an existing property, trace mode lets agents pin an old floor plan or architectural drawing underneath and draw over it. Buildings with more than one floor get a tab per floor. The editor also calculates each room's size in jō, the tatami-based unit Japanese renters are most familiar with.

Agencies can register their own logo or images as parts and set default text, floor and wall styles, so every plan looks like theirs. When a plan is done, it exports as a JPEG without the underlay or grid, ready for the listing. Multi-floor plans export side by side as a single image.

"There's a built-in guide, so I can check how things work and look up keyboard shortcuts while I'm working. Really handy." — CANARY Cloud customer

What's next

Canary is testing a feature that uses AI to read an existing floor plan or architectural drawing and automatically generate an editable floor plan. The team is already seeing the wide range of exciting possibility that their new canvas infrastructure can support.

Want to know more? If you're ready to build your own canvas, get started with the tldraw SDK.