What if your residents could gather information and help you get work done?  That could save a tremendous amount of time for your maintenance staff on move in inspections, for example.  While the quality of information may vary from resident to resident for quarterly or annual inspections, residents can provide valuable pictures and other information providing insight to issues before turning the inspection into a complaint form.  Plus, during the pandemic, this may be the only option for collecting this valuable information.  Inspections provides you a way to integrate residents into your maintenance process making them part of the solution versus complaining about the problems.

Sure, there’s still the tried and true method of providing residents a paper inspection and asking them to fill out, sign and turn in to the office.  Yet, that method lacks pictures, and is typically filed in the resident’s folder.  They are difficult to use for corrective or future action unless someone does the extra work of having them digitized.  Just keep in mind that by using paper, you are providing your residents and staff with an unwritten message about how you view technology and the convenience that it provides.

So, what options do you have?  Well, there are a lot of inspection systems out there, and not all of them support resident-performed inspections.   For those that do, you will need to evaluate them based upon features that offer you value and efficiency.  Starting with the basics, you’ll be looking for systems that not only perform inspections, but also support Resident Performed Inspections. 

Resident Performed Inspections

Resident Performed Inspections allow you to email electronic inspections that residents can fill out themselves without needing to download an application or set up a user account. 

Further, unless you are willing to constantly upload resident data into your inspection system, you’ll want resident data auto-populated through an integration with your property management system. 

Property Management System Integration

Resident data can be automatically loaded into your inspection system from your property management system through an integration.  If this information is not updated for your inspections, you’ll need to periodically upload resident information into your inspection system to be able to send inspections to them. 

Once you have a system that supports Resident Performed Inspections and integrates to your property management system allowing creation, the next step is to be able to easily and efficiently create them.  While creating inspections one-by-one is probably what you’re used to, wouldn’t it be nice to bulk create inspections based upon the move-in and/or move-out dates of the residents? 

Mass Resident Performed Inspection Scheduling Based Upon Move-In/Out Dates

The ability to bulk create or schedule inspections based upon resident lease dates is a big time saver.  Instead of creating 10 individual inspections due this week, you could create all 10 in one process based upon the move-out/move-in dates visible on your dynamically populated turn board. 

Further, if you partner with your residents to have them provide inspections to you on a regular basis, this saves time, reduces unnecessary interactions, and provides consistent insight to the wear and tear of the unit.  Say, you want to have them perform inspections quarterly, wouldn’t it be nice if you could have the inspections be created on a recurring quarterly schedule? 

Ability to schedule recurring inspections

Be able to create inspections that are tied to a recurring schedule, so the inspections are created automatically, instead of having to be manually created. 

Having the resident know that pending inspection results will be used to schedule pending work orders rectifying identified issues, may earn higher reputation management scores.    If nothing has been reported, then the inspection will be closed out at the end of the timeframe. 

Auto Acceptance

The ability to set a timeframe when the resident performed inspection auto-completes, so you do not have to follow-up with them and close any open inspections manually. 

There are certainly many more features around inspections such as inspection comparisons, dynamic turn boards, easy resident charge back capture and reporting, integrated purchasing and work order creation, etc. that are available in certain systems that can prove extremely useful.  You many also want to make sure that the inspection system allows you to grow your maintenance process and is not limited to just tying sub-processes together (like just inspections and work orders).  Having such a limited breadth of functionality may stifle your ability to grow and efficiently perform your overall maintenance process. 

In any case, be sure to make a list of the features that you deem to be important.  Then, reach out to potential inspection providers and try them out.