The last post in this cluster was the final walkthrough from another time zone, where a buyer who had at least seen the house once could not get back for the last look. This is the case past that one: the buyer has never seen the house and is not going to.
An investor in Phoenix is buying a duplex in a city they have visited twice, both times for a conference. Rental or flip, they are doing it from a spreadsheet, a listing, and two people they found locally: an agent and a contractor. The investor is writing the check and will not stand in the place until, possibly, never.
Showing an investor a property they will never visit is a different job from showing a homeowner their own roof. The homeowner knows the house and needs to see one thing. The investor knows nothing and needs to see the whole thing, in the order that matters to the money.
Showing an investor a property in the order of the numbers
An investor buying sight unseen usually has four questions, and none of them is about the paint.
The roof. Age, condition, how many layers, whether it is a this-year problem or a five-year problem. I walk every slope and say out loud which ones are fine, because on a phone screen an ordinary old roof looks like a disaster to somebody who has never been on one.
The mechanicals. Furnace, water heater, panel, meter. Read the data plates to the camera. Hold on the open panel long enough to read the breakers. Run the water at the furthest fixture.
The foundation. Every wall of the basement, or every part of the crawlspace I can reach, with the light on the cracks and a hand or a tape in the frame for scale. The staining that says water has been here, and the corner where it has not.
The block. This one is the agent's, and investors rarely get it. Stand on the sidewalk and turn slowly. The house on either side, the alley, the vacant lot two doors down. Ninety seconds, and it answers questions the listing photos were composed to avoid.
Everything else gets a plain pass: say the room and say what you see. Do not editorialize about what it will cost; that number belongs on the contractor's sheet.
Five people, one link
An investor buying at a distance rarely decides alone. There is a partner. There is somebody from the lender who is going to want to look at the property before money moves. There is the agent, and there is the property manager who will inherit the building the week after closing and would like to know about the water heater before then.
Up to five people can watch the same inspection at once, each on their own phone, wherever they are. The same texted link works on all of them. Nobody installs an app, nobody makes an account, nobody's phone asks for its camera. The contractor sees a count of how many are watching, not names.
Five people who all saw the same crawlspace at the same moment is a different meeting from five people who each got a different summary. Who actually needs to watch is about which of those five need to be live. Usually it is the investor and whoever is co-signing the decision; everyone else gets the recording. Whoever is on, narrate for the one who knows least: name the thing, say what it does, then say what is wrong with it.
The questions come in as frames
Nobody watching can talk into the stream. There is no chat and no microphone on the viewer side. The one thing a viewer can do is tap "I have a question about this," which saves the frame they were looking at, with a short note if they add one, and shows it to the contractor on the contractor's screen while they are still in the building. The frame stays with the recording.
The partner flags the panel because they could not read the main breaker. The contractor, still in the basement, goes back with the light. Nobody talks over anybody, and the questions do not get lost in the hour between the walk and the phone call.
The voice questions happen by phone after the inspection is ended. Say that at the start. Do not take a call while live; on an iPhone that suspends the stream.
The recording is what the investor actually keeps
The live walk is for the decision. The recording is for everything after it.
It starts on its own when the contractor goes live and lands in the company dashboard, not on the contractor's phone, with the flagged frames, any full-resolution stills captured during the walk, and a timestamped history of when it started, when each viewer joined, and when it ended. Recordings are private and reached through short-lived signed links, never a public URL. How long they stay available runs by plan, from 90 days to three years, which matters when a tenant calls about water in March and the investor wants the basement walk again. The security page has the specifics, and it is worth reading before anybody forwards a recording of a rental to a sixth person.
What video cannot tell them, and say so
An investor buying sight unseen is exactly the person who will over-trust a good recording, so this is the part I would not skip.
It cannot carry smell. A damp basement, something dead in a wall, cigarette smoke in the carpet. Say it out loud on the stream, because the camera will not.
It cannot show the block at night, or on a Friday, or the noise from the road. The agent's ninety seconds on the sidewalk is a Tuesday at eleven, and the investor should know that is all it is.
It cannot press on anything. Soft subfloor under the toilet, a window that sticks, a door that has to be lifted to latch. The contractor can say "this is soft" while standing on it, but the investor is taking their word for it. What remote inspection cannot replace is the longer list, and it is worth sending to the investor before the walk so nobody mistakes the stream for a visit.
And it does not make the investor's decision, or anybody else's. It shows the building as it was at eleven on Tuesday, narrated by two people who were standing in it.
The mechanics of getting five people on one link are on the how it works page, and the rest of this cluster starts at how real estate agents use live inspection video.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.