5 Step Guide: Home Inspections

What to Expect When You're Inspecting

If you’re reading this, chances are you own or plan on owning a rental property. Unless you want that property to fall apart, this means you’ll have to conduct inspections at some point. Let’s get this out of the way now: no one likes doing home inspections. They take up a ton of time and usually require you to get down and dirty. Most landlords, especially those with full-time jobs, sigh at the thought of going through every nook and cranny of a house to make sure everything is in order.What to Expect When You’re Inspecting

The only thing worse than doing a home inspection? Not doing a home inspection.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty:

1. Schedule an inspection with your tenant

Owning the property does not give you the right to barge in on your tenants without prior notice. Make sure you know the privacy laws in your state — violating them, even on accident, could result in disaster. These rights should show up in your lease agreement as well. Plus, it’s common courtesy to give your tenants a heads up and make sure the time is convenient for them.

You don’t want to drop by for inspections too frequently, either. For one, more inspections just means more work on your part. More than that, though, your tenants won’t appreciate you constantly badgering them. You should have already screened your tenants enough to where you can trust them, so trust them. Most landlords and tenants agree that annual checks are ideal, although you can probably get away with 6-month inspections if you feel so inclined.

2. Make a checklist

The checklist is the bread and butter of the inspection process. Without it, you might as well be putting a jigsaw puzzle together with a bunch of identical pieces. You can easily find templates, such as this one from Total Home Inspection, with a quick Google search. Plenty of templates exist; some are more exhaustive than others. If you’re inspecting a one bedroom apartment, you probably don’t need a 15 page checklist. On the other hand, don’t cheat yourself. The less comprehensive your checklist is, the more likely you are to overlook something.

3. Do the inspection

As long as you’ve built your checklist, you won’t need to do much preparation. Make sure you have a pen and pad with your checklist, along with a digital camera with enough space to store pictures of any damage or maintenance issues. With the proper software, you can usually use a smartphone in lieu of all these.

Once you’re there, let your tenant know. Go through the house and check off every item, noting anything that looks like it may require maintenance soon. Not all problems show visible symptoms, so ask the tenant if they’ve noticed anything out of the ordinary. For instance, I once had a shower faucet that looked completely fine, yet shrieked horrendously every time I turned it on. A bit of caulk and it was back to new, but a landlord never would have noticed that without using the shower.

This goes without saying, but be thorough. You put a checklist together for a reason, so don’t cut corners when it comes to execution. Carefully inspect each item individually, and even if you only have a lingering suspicion that something may be wrong, document it and take a picture. Inspections help identify existing problems, but they mostly serve as a preventative measure so that you can fix things before they become problems.

4. Build the report

After conducting the inspection, you’ve probably identified at least a couple things that need to be tended to. A scattered checklist with photos stored in the cloud won’t suffice organizationally. You’ll have to construct an inspection report that follows the three Cs: clear, concise, and comprehensive. Not only will this help you with documentation in the future, it will also give you something to show your tenants so they can understand and address any issues that have come up.

Pillar to Post offers a perfect example of a full inspection report here. Note the clarity of the checkboxes, the conciseness of the notes next to each item, and the comprehensiveness offered with the pictures of each point. I would give this report a 10 out of 10.

5. Go over it with your tenant

Now that you’ve gone through the trouble of putting a report together, it’s time to go through it with your tenant. Make sure you let them know of each item that needs maintenance in detail. If they don’t know where the problems are, they can’t fix them. If they can’t fix them, not only will you have to fix them later on, but they may take legal action against you for not disclosing everything they need to get the security deposit back.

At the end of the day, inspections cover a lot of areas, and it’s possible that you will miss something. Let your tenant know this, and encourage them to contact you in the future if anything does come up. As long as you’re as honest and thorough as you can be, the inspection should go smoothly.