Ask three people who owns an inspection video and you get three confident answers. The inspector shot it, so it feels like theirs. The homeowner's roof is in it, so it feels like theirs. The company paid for the truck, the ladder and the afternoon, so the office assumes it is theirs. All three are partly right, which is exactly why the question needs settling before anyone is upset.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. What follows is the working policy that has caused the fewest arguments, and one sentence I will say only once: check with your own attorney about how ownership, consent and retention rules apply where you operate.
The company holds it
Start with the practical answer, because it is the one that keeps the record intact. The recording is the company's business record of work the company performed. It lives in the company's system, under the company's account, for the retention window the company chose. Not on a personal device, not in a text thread, not in whichever cloud drive happened to be signed in that day.
That does not mean the company owns the roof, the house or the homeowner's face. It means the company is the custodian of the record. Custodian is a better word than owner for most of what follows. The custodian's job is to keep it safe, keep it complete and hand out copies to the people entitled to them.
The homeowner gets a copy, not the only copy
A homeowner who asks for the video should get it, and they should not have to argue. It is their roof and they watched the inspection live. Refusing a copy tells them you have something to hide, which is a strange position for a company that chose to inspect on camera in the first place.
What they should not get is the original leaving your system. Send a copy, and send it through a private link that expires on its own rather than an MP4 attached to an email that will be forwarded forever. The live viewer link is not that copy. It dies when the inspection ends, on purpose. A copy is a separate, deliberate act by somebody at the office, and it should stay that way. Who should be able to see a recording works through the rest of that list.
The inspector's phone is not where it lives
This is the part most small operations get wrong by default rather than by decision. If the recording lands in the inspector's camera roll first and the company gets it second, the company does not really hold anything. It holds whatever got uploaded, whenever somebody remembered, minus whatever was deleted to free up space before a long weekend.
The fix is structural, not a memo. Capture that goes to the company's system as it happens means the inspector never has a copy to lose, to keep or to take with them. The inspector is still the author. Their name is on it, their voice is on it, and that authorship is part of what makes the record useful. Authorship and custody are different things, and the record is safer when they are.
Inspection video retention when the homeowner asks you to delete it
Sooner or later a homeowner will call and ask you to delete the video. Sometimes they have sold the house. Sometimes a family member wandered into frame. Sometimes they have simply changed their mind about being on camera. Every one of those is a reasonable person asking a reasonable question, and the worst response is to improvise.
The honest answer starts before the inspection, not after. Tell them at the beginning, in plain words: this is being recorded, the company keeps the recording for a set period as its record of the work, and you can have a copy at any time. Recording consent in plain language has wording that fits in one breath. A homeowner who heard that up front rarely asks for deletion later, because they already know what they agreed to.
When they do ask, decide your policy once and apply it every time. Mine: the recording is the company's record of work performed on that property, and it stays for the retention period, the same as an invoice or a signed contract would. I tell them exactly how long that is and when it will be gone. I send them a copy if they want one. I do not delete it early on request, because a record you delete when asked is not a record, and the next person who asks may not be the homeowner.
Your policy may differ. That is fine. What is not fine is having it differ from one phone call to the next.
Write it down before anyone asks
Three lines are enough:
- The company holds every inspection recording for [retention period], then it is removed.
- The homeowner may request a copy at any time. An authorised team member sends a private link.
- Recordings are not deleted early on request. Exceptions need [owner name] and are noted on the file.
Put it where the office can read it back to a caller, and put the first line in the words you say before you go live. Ownership arguments almost always turn out to be surprise arguments. Remove the surprise and there is not much left to argue about.
Where a recording lands and who can open it is set out on the security page. Retention is set by plan, 90 days, one year or three, and every plan opens with a free week, so you can walk the whole path yourself before you describe it to a customer.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.