A rental inspection app will save you time and money. There’s no doubt that printing inspection forms can take time to create, time to print, and cost for supplies like ink and paper (not to mention the cost of the equipment). However, if you’ve got a phone or tablet, there’s a much more efficient way to document your rental inspections.

Property owners and managers can use a rental inspection app to document their property asset audits. Inspection software can save companies time and money and allow for simple task automation for more efficient inspection processes.

Owning rental properties is a great way to maintain a growing and possibly cash-positive asset portfolio. However, maintaining rental properties also means that you need to document property conditions, property incidents, and any property inspection required between residencies or even annual property audits.

Property Inspection Management Made Easy

The rental property market is filled with obstacles for tenants and property owners. However, one of the grey areas that can creep up for landlords is the implied warranty of habitability. This implication is often included in most jurisdictions in the United States within residential leases. (source)

What does the implied warranty of habitability mean to you, the property owner or manager? You must reasonably maintain the rental property per your region’s local housing and building codes. It is implied that the tenant pays only if the property is up to the basic standards of reasonable habitation.

Due to a tenant’s ability to invoke the implied warranty of habitability in most regions, the property owner must inspect, maintain, and repair the property to ensure the property meets habitation standards.

Of course, maintaining a property is a wise decision to maintain property value and minimum legal standards.

Given the potential complexity of any rental property and the following legal requirements, it is advisable to utilize a robust solution to maintain your property documentation. That is, regarding inspections, incidents, or even preventive action reports for your maintenance or ground care teams.

If you own multiple properties, the situation’s complexity increases exponentially with every new property you add to your portfolio. Therefore, a robust solution is essential. Let’s consider the features you need to consider with such a solution.

The Rental Inspection App – Essential Required Features

Essentially you need to have an inspection app that works. It has to work whether you have a cell signal or not. It needs to allow you to complete an inspection and include all the necessary data. Similarly, you should be able to input photos, videos, audio clips, or files. Perhaps you want to attach a file to the report, like a copy of a PDF of the lease agreement.

To sum up, the essential features must include, at a minimum, a relatively straightforward user interface, the ability to input the data you need, and the ability to keep it organized.

Why You Need A More Robust Solution

As simple as a few essential features might be, there is a growing need for more evolutionary measures in a changing world. That is to say, solutions that can evolve with your growing business, the changing requirements, and anything else that might shake up your property management.

What if there is an incident at the property? Your tenant might contact you to tell you of a broken window from a neighborhood kid who was playing around with a baseball. Can a dedicated app, specifically for property inspection alone? Can it handle an incident like a broken window? What about basement flooding? Or even an issue with snow removal if you live in an area with frigid winters.

Since you require incident and inspection management, you need something far more potent than a mere inspection app dedicated to property inspections. It would be best if you had a solution like 1st Reporting.

Let’s look at some of the more advanced features you can take advantage of by switching to 1st Reporting for your business.

Making Rental Inspections Easy With The 1st Reporting App

Landlords who use an inspection app instead of paper for documenting property inspections enjoy several benefits. First, an inspection app makes the inspection process much easier and faster. Landlords can open the app on their phone or tablet and complete the inspection immediately. Additionally, landlords can easily add photos, videos, or audio clips to their inspection reports.

Another great benefit of using an inspection app is that it allows landlords to keep track of all their inspections in one place. It is beneficial for landlords who own multiple properties. With 1st Reporting, landlords can easily see which properties have been inspected and which need to be inspected. Landlords can also run reports on their inspection data to identify any trends or problems.

1st Reporting’s app also offers several advanced features that make it even more powerful and helpful for landlords. For example, 1st Reporting provides a “checklist” feature that allows landlords to create a custom checklist for their inspections. It is constructive for ensuring that all the essential items are checked during the inspection.

Additionally, 1st has multiple other features above and beyond what a dedicated property inspection app may include. Let’s look at those features to see how they will benefit your property management inspections, incidents, and more.

Unified Solutions For Incident and Inspection Management

We’ve already mentioned how the 1st Reporting app is helpful for inspections and incidents. However, it is also in sync with the Microsoft Teams app.

That’s right; you can access 1st Reporting within the Teams environment. It makes meeting fellow managers, property owners, or others and sharing report findings never easier.

Given that you can make the app work for many different scenarios, be it inspections, incidents, or even process checklists, it’s a unified solution to all your documentation needs.

Automated Processes

If you haven’t considered automating simple processes, it’s time you did. Time is the most valuable thing we have, and you can’t get it back once it’s gone. Automating processes saves you time and money (but more importantly is the time, of course).

Here’s a scenario. You send out one of your property managers to complete a property inspection. While on-site for the examination, they notice a hazard in waiting – a railing with a razor-sharp edge due to rust! Your team member quickly creates a report on their phone in the 1st Reporting app.

A notification alerts you that the hazard report creation occurs. You are one click away from viewing the report, so you can take control of the situation and dispatch the appropriate party to fix the railing before a tenant gets hurt.

You could have dispatched the appropriate party while your team member on-site sets some pylons and caution tape to prevent tenant incidents.

Simple processes like customized notifications can save you from missing or forgetting essential events or situations. These solutions can also save you time and, therefore, money. Saving time also helps you improve your response time to manage these situations.

From emergencies to regular maintenance, automated processes can speed up your work and make it easier for all involved.

Dynamic Workflows Essential To Property Management

One of an intelligent application’s most exciting features is the creation and implementation of dynamic workflows. What are dynamic workflows? Dynamic workflows are work-related processes that change dynamically based on user input.

Yeah, 1st Reporting utilizes the latest in dynamic workflow application programming. Here’s an example of how this could apply to your situation.

You send your property manager again to another asset to inspect a complaint about a property issue. Upon arriving, your property manager notes that it is an issue with a water heater.

Your manager opens the 1st Reporting app on their smartphone and generates an equipment failure report. As the manager selects the equipment in question, the form changes to reflect the inquiries you want your manager to ask to prompt the information input you need on the report. If the manager had chosen an air conditioner or furnace as the equipment with the issue, the form would have changed to suit that equipment instead.

Think of the potential applications, especially when combined with customized notifications. You could set up a notification that notifies explicitly your appropriate emergency personnel to deal with the emergency or non-emergency property discrepancy without ever dialing their number or even typing out a text message. It doesn’t get much easier than that, now does it?

Customizable Functionality

You’re starting to see just how powerful the 1st Reporting app is. But wait, there’s more to come, much more.

Perhaps your property asset portfolio contains specific types of properties, like commercial properties, for example. You may want to create customized inspection or incident forms to suit your particular assets. Similarly, you may even want to complete a specific office form for your team to use on the app.

1st Reporting offers customization solutions for form, checklist, and other document creation. That means you can make nearly any form, checklist, document, or workflow you can imagine. Our team is on hand to help with any complex customizations that seem beyond your scope. Our people back up our app and set us apart from the competition, too – not just our customizable mobile reporting solutions.

Inspection Location Features

Managing multiple properties is challenging, primarily when those assets are located across different areas. Not to worry, the 1st Reporting app has built-in location features.

Your inspection teams will allow the app to access their device location data, and the app does the rest. It matches the location data to the report generated, so the report has dynamically established a location. It allows the user to easily input the inspection or incident location without the need to type in the address. This time-saving feature is both time-saving and helpful for the user completing the report.

Offline Mode

An app with the offline mode is a huge benefit when it comes to capturing data. The app will store the data locally on the device so that it can be accessed even when the user is not in the range of a network. It is an essential feature for any organization that relies on timely data collection from its inspectors.

For example, imagine if you are an inspector and are out in the field completing an inspection. The app will store the data locally on your device, so you will still have the information you collected even if you lose a signal or your battery dies. This huge time-saver ensures that you always have the most up-to-date data.

Standards and Procedures Library

This versatile app is a section for you to upload any standards, procedures, manuals, or other documentation for your team to reference. This feature allows you to provide your team with a library of information available at their fingertips to assist them with completing their assigned tasks.

Team Management Made Easy

Managing your team is easy with the 1st Reporting app. The user-friendly platform lets you input your team and set custom notifications to the appropriate team members, managers, or others you’ve chosen to add.

You can set up your team member profiles using the team management screen, including contact details, job titles, and more. You can also set their access rights to the platform to assign individuals specific user roles for the software.

Similarly, you can quickly review reports your team has created via the document manager we’ll discuss next.

Document Manager With Mapview

Document Manager

1st’s built-in Document Manager makes it straightforward to manage your inspections across multiple locations. The manager view is adjustable between table, map, and split views, giving you ultimate control over how the interface presents your report database.

Mapview

Multiple map views are available to better view your inspection or incident locations. The views include:

• Road Map View
• Aerial View
• Bird’s Eye View
• Street View 

With the split view, you can see both the table of incidents/inspections/reports and a map view which even shows icons for the individual reports generated at their prospective locations.

Summary Reports For Better Trend Analysis

Combing through filing cabinet drawers for old reports and then analyzing the reports for trends can take hours, even days or weeks, depending on the number of reports. As you can well imagine, reviewing even a year’s worth of reports at a dynamic company could cost a pretty penny for the labor to complete a report analysis.

With a robust digital solution like 1st Reporting for your inspections and incidents, you can use our innovative technology to provide summary reports in minutes or seconds.

Trend analysis is crucial for understanding preventive measures for recurring incidents or failures observed via inspection. Using 1st will save you exponential amounts of time (and therefore labor and cost) regarding summary reporting and trend analysis processes.

Transparent App Pricing For Professionals

The last and often one of the most crucial deciding factors for a company to choose a robust rental inspection app is cost. Many inspection app developers do their best to lure you into buying without being fully transparent about the fees. This strategy is both deceiving and a waste of your time.

A robust, professional solution (like 1st Reporting) will offer complete transparency regarding inspection app pricing. If you want clear and transparent pricing, 1st is one of the few that openly share pricing so you can easily collaborate with your purchasing team to incorporate the solution into your company.

Summary

1st Reporting is an app that helps managers save time and money by providing a library of information, team management features, and a document manager with multiple map views. The app also offers transparent pricing and summary reports for trend analysis.

The 1st Reporting app makes professional rental property inspections easy and efficient. The dynamic customization and notification features make the app one of the most powerful for all your inspection, incident, and reporting requirements.