The house is empty. The seller moved out three weeks ago and lives four hours away now. The agent had a showing at ten and a closing at two. The inspection is at eleven, so the inspector pulls the code out of the lockbox, spends two hours alone in a house with the power on and nothing in it, and leaves. That evening a PDF lands in two inboxes.
That is the normal shape of a pre-listing inspection, and it is why a pre-listing inspection video does more here than almost anywhere else. On most jobs somebody is at least standing in the driveway. On this one nobody is, and the report becomes the only artifact that will ever exist of what happened in that house.
The report is the only thing anybody sees
A pre-listing report is a strange document. It is written to be complete, so it lists everything: the failed GFCI, the missing downspout extension, the two lifted shingles at the north rake, the water heater that is eleven years old and working fine. Every line carries the same weight on the page.
Then two people who were not there read it.
The seller reads forty items about a house they thought was in good shape and hears an accusation. The agent reads the same list and has to decide, without having seen any of it, which three items matter before the house goes live. Neither of them can tell from the page whether "moderate granule loss, south slope" means replace the roof or means the roof is nineteen years into an ordinary life.
You fix that with a phone call. Everybody does. The call takes twenty minutes, it happens from memory, and it leaves nothing behind, so it gets had again next week with the other party.
What the seller needs is not what the agent needs
Worth separating, because one walk serves both if you know that is what you are doing.
The seller needs a reason to believe the findings. They are being told their house has problems by a stranger they are paying, right before they put a number on it. Skepticism there is rational and it is not personal. Seeing the north rake themselves, on their own phone, with somebody narrating, settles it faster than any amount of report formatting.
The agent needs something to hand a buyer. To most buyers a report reads like a warning label, a wall of text where every line looks equally bad. Ten minutes of the inspector walking the roof and the crawlspace, saying out loud what is worn and what is fine, is a different kind of object. It shows the condition, and it shows that nothing was kept quiet.
Both come out of the two hours the inspector was already spending in that house.
Running a pre-listing inspection video in an empty house
Practically it is easier than a walk with the homeowner underfoot. Nobody is in the way and you are not stopping every four minutes.
Text the link before you start. The seller and the agent can hold the same link and watch on their own phones from wherever they are, and neither installs anything or makes an account. The inspector sees a live count of how many people are watching, which is the one thing worth knowing: whether anybody is actually there.
Then narrate for people who cannot see the room. In an occupied house you can say "the corner by the window" and be understood. On a phone screen in an empty house, say the room, the wall and the direction: "second bedroom, north wall, above the window." Same on the roof. Slope, then feature, then the thing itself.
Say the boring parts out loud. Pre-listing is the walk where "this is fine" does as much work as "this is not." The seller is bracing for the forty-item list and needs to hear the inspector say the furnace is clean and drafting properly. Photographing what is not wrong is the same discipline, and it applies double here.
Expect the questions afterward. The viewer side is one way on purpose. No chat, no microphone, no way to interrupt. If the agent has a question, they call once you are down, which is fine, because you will be down within the hour and the recording will still exist.
The recording is the part that keeps working
Live is for the seller. Recorded is for everyone who arrives later, and on a listing that is most of the people involved.
The house goes under contract in three weeks and the buyer's side asks about the roof. The agent has a recording of the inspector on that roof, in daylight, saying what he saw, dated before the listing went up. Nobody has to remember anything and nobody has to reopen the house.
The recording lands with the company automatically instead of on the inspector's phone, so it is still findable in October when the same agent calls about a different house and then about this one. Recordings are private and reached through short-lived signed links rather than public URLs, which matters when the subject is somebody's house and address. How long they stay available runs from 90 days to three years by plan. The security page has the specifics on who can open what.
One caution. A recording of a house is not a marketing asset and should not get forwarded around as one. Who sees it is a decision, not a default, and sharing with a third party safely is about making that decision once instead of every time.
Where it is not worth the trouble
Same test as everywhere else: is there a decision riding on this, and is the person making it unable to see the thing? On a pre-listing inspection the answer is usually yes twice, which is why it sits on the list of live inspection use cases at all.
That does not mean the whole appointment. Nobody needs to watch two hours of systems checks live. Run the walk the way you always run it, and put the link out for the twenty minutes that carry the decisions: the roof, the crawlspace or the basement, and whatever the one real finding turns out to be. If the house is unremarkable, say so on a five minute recording and let everyone get on with their day.
The version where the seller taps a texted link from four hours away and watches in their browser is 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.