When the owner lives somewhere else was about the relay: the tenant tells the neighbor who tells the owner, and every hop drops something. This is the version where the tenant is gone too, so there is nobody at the far end of the relay at all.
I manage a few dozen units for owners who mostly live in other states. The move-out inspection is the walk I get the most phone calls about, and it is the one where the fewest people are present. The tenant handed the keys to the office on Friday and drove to Ohio. The owner is in Arizona and has not been inside the unit since the tenant moved in three years ago. On Monday morning I am standing in an empty apartment, about to describe its condition to two people who are not there, and who are about to disagree about it.
That is the whole shape of a move-out inspection after the tenant is gone. Whatever I write down, one of them is going to say it was already like that and the other is going to say it was not, and neither of them saw it.
What the walk is for, and what it is not for
A move-out inspection records the condition of the unit on the day the tenant is gone. That is all it does. It does not record what the unit looked like the day they moved in; that is the move-in record's job, and if you do not have a good one, no amount of care on the way out will make up for it. And it does not decide anything about what happens next between the owner and the tenant. That is between them and whoever advises them, and I keep my nose out of it. The walk just makes sure that the argument, if there is one, is about the same pictures.
Running a move-out inspection live for the owner
I sign in on my phone in the parking lot, tap Go live, and text the owner the link. They tap it and watch in their browser. No app, no account, and their phone never asks for its camera, which for a seventy year old owner in Arizona is the difference between watching and not.
Then I walk it the same way every time, so that in a year I can walk it the same way again.
- Say the room and the wall before the thing. "Bedroom two, north wall, below the window." An empty room on a phone screen has no landmarks.
- Every wall, floor and ceiling of every room, one slow pan, lights on. The wall that is fine is a finding, and the owner needs to hear the word.
- Open everything. Closets, cabinets, the oven, under the sinks. Run the water. Flush.
- A still of every room. I capture a full-resolution still from the doorway of each room and one of anything I would put on a list. They stay attached to the inspection.
- Scale in the frame. A hand or a tape next to the scratch in the floor. A phone screen makes a three inch scratch and a three foot one look identical.
- Say what you do not know. "There is a patch on this wall. I cannot tell from here whether it was here at move-in." The move-in record answers that, or nothing does.
The owner cannot talk into the stream. The viewer side is watch-only, no chat, no microphone. What they can do is tap "I have a question about this," which saves the frame they were looking at, with a short note, and shows it on my screen while I am still in the unit. The owner flags the kitchen floor with "was that there?" and I go back and put a tape on it. The frame stays with the recording. The voice conversation happens by phone once I have ended the inspection, from the parking lot.
The tenant who is in Ohio
The same link works on more than one phone. If the tenant wants to watch the move-out walk from Ohio, they can have the link, and I offer it. They watch the same walk the owner watches, in the same moment, with the same narration, and they can flag frames the same way. What they cannot do is argue with me through the stream, which is a quiet advantage on this walk in particular.
Tell both of them at the start that the other one might be watching. The count on my screen tells me how many are watching, not who, so I say it out loud regardless: "The owner has the link, so does the previous tenant, and the recording is going to the owner." Nothing on this walk should be a surprise to anybody later. Telling people plainly that you are recording has the two sentences.
Dated, kept, and not on my phone
Recording starts on its own when I go live and lands in the company dashboard, not on my phone, with the stills, the flagged frames, and a timestamped history of when the walk started, when each viewer joined, and when it ended. So there is a record, dated the Monday after the keys came back, of what the unit looked like and who was watching when.
That date is the point. On a move-out the argument is almost always about when: was the unit like this before the tenant left, or after. Timestamps a phone clock cannot explain away goes into why a record with a time on it that I did not set is a different kind of object from a photo folder. It settles the when and leaves only the what.
Recordings are private, reached through short-lived signed links and never a public URL, and how long they stay available runs by plan, up to three years. If the owner wants the tenant to have the recording, that is the owner's call, a decision and not a default. The security page has who can open what.
When I do not bother
If the tenant did a walk with me before they left and the owner already signed off on it, the empty-unit walk is a photo job. Shoot the stills, file them, move on.
If the unit is going straight into a renovation, the condition on Monday matters a lot less than the condition after, and that is the walk to put the owner on.
And if the owner has already told me they do not want to watch, I do not ask twice. The recording exists either way. The parent post, when live inspection video is worth it, has the two-question test for when the live part earns its two minutes. On a move-out with an absent owner and an absent tenant it passes almost every time, because two people are about to decide something and neither of them can see the thing. The mechanics are on the how it works page.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.