The property manager called on a Thursday. He wanted the roof video from a fourplex I had walked the week before, and he wanted it forwarded to his regional guy, who would probably forward it to the ownership group. Reasonable request. Also the moment I realized I had no policy at all for what happens when you share inspection video with a third party, and that whatever I did in the next ten minutes was going to become the policy by default.
Internal access you can fix. You change a permission, you have a conversation, done. Footage that has left your company is gone in a way you cannot reach. So the rules have to happen before you hit send, not after.
Who actually asks
More people than you would expect, and most of them have a legitimate reason.
The homeowner's spouse or adult kid, who is handling this for a parent. A property manager or an HOA board for a shared structure. Another trade, usually a gutter or siding sub who needs to see a condition before they quote. A manufacturer's field rep looking at a product question. An engineer or an attorney the homeowner hired herself. Occasionally a real estate agent, which is the one I look at hardest, because the interests in that conversation are not always the homeowner's.
And sometimes the homeowner's insurer, or somebody working for them. I will get to that one, because my answer there is different from all the others.
Ask the homeowner first, every single time
This is the rule that does all the work. Everything else is mechanics.
It is her property and her recording as much as it is mine. Before footage of her house goes to anybody she did not send me to, I ask her, in words she can answer with a yes or a no. Not a clause in a contract she signed six weeks ago. A text message: the property manager wants a copy of the roof video to send to the owners, is that alright with you.
Two minutes. It has never gone badly. Twice she said no, and both times there was context I had no idea about, which is exactly the point. You do not know what is going on in somebody's life. A recording of a house is not a neutral object.
The fourplex was easier than most because the manager was the owner's agent, but I still asked the owner. He appreciated being asked, which surprised me at the time and does not anymore.
Four rules before you share inspection video with a third party
Once the homeowner has said yes, the mechanics matter.
Send it to a person, not to an address list. A named recipient you can point at later. Not a shared inbox, not a departmental alias with unknown membership, not a group chat. If you cannot name who is on the other end, you are not sharing, you are publishing.
Use a link that dies. Not an attachment, not a file dropped in a folder with anybody-with-the-link turned on. A short-lived signed URL means the copy sitting in somebody's forwarded email is a dead address in a day or two. It also means the recipient has to actually watch it rather than sit on a permanent key. This is the same mechanism behind the viewer links, which I went through in what secure inspection video sharing means.
Keep the original where it lives. Do not export a copy to your desktop to email it. The second a file exists outside the system it is outside every control you set up, and it will end up on a laptop that gets replaced without anybody thinking about it.
Write down that you did it. Who asked, what the homeowner said, what you sent, when. One line in the job notes. Not for lawyers. For the phone call in nine months when somebody asks how the regional guy got this.
The request I always hand back
When the request comes from an insurance direction, my answer is the same regardless of who is asking and how nicely.
I tell them to go to the homeowner. She can share her recording with her insurer if she wants to, and she has that ability directly, and I stay out of the middle of it entirely. I do not send footage into a claim conversation on somebody's behalf, I do not characterize what is on it for an insurer, and I do not get on a call about it.
That is not me being difficult. I am a contractor, not a licensed public adjuster, and unlicensed public adjusting is a crime in most states rather than a gray area. Coverage is between the homeowner and her insurer. What I have is a record of what her property looked like on a specific day, and the right person to decide where that record goes is her.
Handing it back has never cost me a job. It has occasionally confused someone who expected a fight, which I take as a good sign.
What this does not cover
Any third party who can watch can screen record. You are not preventing a determined copy, you are preventing the casual permanent one, and the casual permanent one is what actually causes problems.
Expiring links also do nothing about a recipient you should not have chosen. If you share inspection video with a third party who had no business getting it, the link expiring on Friday does not fix that. That is a judgment call made before you send, and it is the same judgment I described for internal access in who should be able to see an inspection video.
And none of it substitutes for what you record in the first place. If you walked past an open window on the way to the ridge, that is in the file forever, and the cleanest fix is to not put it there. Point at the roof. Talk about the roof.
The property manager got his link. It worked for two days. His regional guy watched it, the ownership group got their own link a week later, and the whole thing took about four minutes of my attention. That is what this is supposed to feel like.
If you want the specifics on link lifetime and how a signed URL gets issued, the security model page is short and plain. Pricing is per job, so sharing with the people who genuinely need to see something does not turn into a seat count conversation. Read the security page and decide for yourself whether the model matches how you would want your own house handled.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.