Inspections 101

Hey, I'm Rob of Rob Brooks Realty Property Management, and this is Danielle White. We're going to talk about inspections. You are in charge of getting all these inspections done, so we're going to let owners know what these inspections entail. Let's just start with why we do inspections. This is totally unscripted, by the way, so we're authentic, let's just say it that way. So, why do we do the inspections?

One, it helps the owners and us as property managers. We get a baseline at the start. So, when a new property comes on board, we will go into the property and take a full inspection from top to bottom, baseboards to the ceiling, inside, outside, inside the cabinets, whatever. We have a baseline of everything in the property, so you know from start to finish what everything looks like. If there's something that the owner may need to call attention to for liability reasons, anything like that, we can make a note right away. We can help schedule and facilitate those repairs if needed, and just have everything as immaculate as we possibly can.

Then, we'll have the tenants go through, and we do kind of a baseline for them as well. So, for their security deposit, we can say, "Okay, this is the condition the property was in when you moved in, and it should be in this condition when you move out, or else we're going to take some portion of your security deposit for the owner's accountability." The accountability just really helps the tenants know, "Okay, these are the expectations for me, and yes, they are checking." If the expectations are not met, then we have a base of, "Okay, here's what happens," and we have the before and after on the inspections.

I do one for the tenants, and then we also give them an inspection form that they can fill out. So, we go through it, we let them know, "Hey, you know, we're in here for a couple of hours, we're doing the full inspection to our best ability, but you're moving in, so you know, check behind us. We're human, so if you see something, mark it." Then we've got a great comparison, hopefully a full list of anything that may or may not be needed. We have a paper that is written down, kind of a checklist of inspection, and then there is some software that we use.

We use a program called Happy Inspector. What it does is it makes us go through each and every room, and inside and outside, that top-to-bottom inspection. We take pictures of every single item all the way around, so you're spinning in a circle taking pictures of the room, the baseboards, the floor, the ceiling, everything. It has the ability to leave notes as well, and at the end of the inspection when we close it out, it makes this beautiful PDF file of the entire inspection that we can send to the owners. So, they can see all of those pictures as well from top to bottom and ensure that we have done our job and inspected the property as best. The PDF makes it easy to send to the owner; it also makes it good for filing.

How long do we keep an inspection? Forever! We keep it forever, and then we can keep track of the condition of a property as time goes on. Listen, everybody, even with perfect tenants, even with owners, properties degrade over time. So we just need to be ready that, okay, the carpet is going to have to be replaced even with perfect tenants over the years. That's just a little side tip that I know is somewhat related to the inspections.

There's something else that we do on a certain basis, but then there's something that we do every month. We do monthly photos. One of us will do what we call a "drive-by," and we go take a photo of the front of the property, literally a drive-by shooting. We go and we take a picture of the outside of the house and make sure that the yard is kept up, that the cars are only in the driveway, that they don't have a boat sitting in the front yard or something weird like that. We send all of that to the owners as well. You can tell a lot about how a tenant is taking care of property just by how they're taking care of the front. These pictures are available to you as owners every month, so even if you're out of town or out of the country, you can know the status of what your neighbors are seeing at the property.

With our inspections, we do one at the beginning of a lease, at the end of the lease, and even in the middle. So, we try to get into your property basically every six months.

Thank you, Danielle. I sure appreciate what you do. Y'all have a nice day.