Before I start a session I say one sentence out loud, on camera, every time. This is being recorded, video and audio, so you have a copy of what I found. That is it. It takes four seconds and I have never once had it cost me a job. Recording consent on an inspection is not a legal ritual to me, it is a basic courtesy that happens to also be the thing that protects the relationship when somebody asks questions six months later.
I want to be direct about what this post is and is not. I am a contractor. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and I am deliberately not going to tell you what any state requires, because I do not know and neither does anyone writing a blog post about it in general terms.
The sentence I say
Plain language beats careful language here. Careful language sounds like you are hiding something.
What I do not say: this session may be recorded for quality and training purposes. Nobody has ever listened to that sentence in the history of the world.
What I say: I am recording this, video and sound, so you end up with a record of what your roof looked like today. If you would rather I did not, tell me now and I will just walk it and talk to you.
Two things happen when you put it that way. The recording becomes something the homeowner gets rather than something being done to her, which is true and worth saying. And the person on the other end is given a real out. Almost nobody takes it. The one time somebody did, it was because her ex was the one who had called me and she did not want a recording of that address existing. She was right to ask and it cost me nothing to respect it.
The software asks too, and it does not skip
A recording notice comes up before video starts and it has to be acknowledged. The server will not begin the stream until that acknowledgment lands. It is not a preference. It is not a checkbox in a settings screen that an app can quietly bypass when the connection is bad.
I built it that way because I know exactly what I am like at 4:40 on a Friday with one more roof to walk. The whole point of putting it in the software is that it happens on the days I would have forgotten, and those are the days it matters. Consent that depends on the contractor remembering is not much of a system.
It also produces a record that it happened. Not because I expect a fight, but because the alternative is my word about a conversation nobody wrote down, and my word is exactly what all of this is designed to stop relying on. That principle runs through the whole thing, and I laid the rest of it out in what secure inspection video sharing means.
Recording consent on an inspection is a relationship question first
Strip out the legal framing for a second and just look at what happens between two people.
You are on somebody's property with a camera. She is not there. You are recording sound, which means you are recording anything said in range, including whatever her tenant says from the driveway or her kid says through an open window. If she finds out later that this was recorded and nobody mentioned it, the damage is not legal. The damage is that she now thinks about you differently, and she is going to tell her neighbor about it.
Tell people. Not because someone is going to catch you. Because the entire value of showing a homeowner her own roof is that she believes what she is watching, and you cannot build belief on something you did not disclose.
The same courtesy runs to everybody else in earshot. If a tenant, a neighbor, or the customer's brother-in-law walks up while the camera is rolling, I tell them the same sentence. It is not complicated. It just has to be a habit rather than a decision you make each time.
Where I stop and a lawyer starts
Here is the part I take seriously enough to be boring about.
Rules about recording audio are not uniform. States differ, sometimes a lot, in how they treat consent for recording a conversation, who has to agree, and what counts as a conversation in the first place. You will see people summarize it online with a two-color map. Do not run your business off that map. The wrinkles that actually matter are things like whether anybody is in earshot who is not part of the call, what happens when you work across a state line, and how any of it applies to a camera on a roof pointed at a chimney.
I am not qualified to answer any of that and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I did was pay a lawyer licensed in the states I work in for an hour of her time and ask her specifically about the way I run inspections. It was not expensive, and it turned a thing I was vaguely uneasy about into a written practice I stopped thinking about.
Do that. If you work in more than one state, ask about each one. Nothing in this post is a substitute for that conversation, and anybody who tells you a general rule about recording consent that covers your inspection business is guessing.
What I never put on the recording
Separate from consent, there is the question of what comes out of my mouth while the camera is running.
I describe condition. Bruising here, granule loss in the valley, three nails backed out along this ridge, decking feels soft at this step. Things I can point at.
I do not talk about coverage, what a policy might pay, whether somebody should file, or what any of it is worth. I am a contractor, not a licensed public adjuster, and unlicensed public adjusting is a crime in most states, not a gray area. If insurance is part of the homeowner's situation, that is between her and her insurer, and my footage is just a record of what the roof looked like on a particular day. Being on camera makes that discipline easier, incidentally. It is easier to hold a line you know is being recorded.
Once a recording exists, the next question is who gets to open it, which I went through in who should be able to see an inspection video.
The security model page covers how the notice is enforced and where the acknowledgment is stored, and pricing is per job if you want to see what running it on every inspection actually costs. Read the security page, then go call a lawyer. In that order or the other one, I do not care, just do both.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.