Pausing inspections feels like the cautious option. For a portfolio of any size it is the expensive one, and the bill arrives later.
In spring 2020 property inspections stopped, at least temporarily, at a great many management companies. Any experienced manager knows the value of mid-occupancy inspections and seasonal due diligence: checking HVAC before a summer heatwave, winterising before a freeze, catching the slow leak while it is still cheap.
For a company responsible for hundreds or thousands of residential units, even a two-week hiatus carries consequences. Some properties develop issues that are only discoverable during an inspection, and every week of suspension adds to the scheduling crunch that lands the moment inspections resume.
Many companies had still not reinstated a regular or revised inspection procedure six months in. That is not negligence, it is arithmetic: once you are behind on a portfolio-wide cadence, catching up requires capacity you never had spare in the first place.
zInspector made COVID property inspection tools free to all accountholders, including those who did not pay for their account, for the duration of the crisis. The more durable point is that the best managers were looking for methods that reduce and eliminate future disruption from pandemics or anything else the century produces.
The protocol itself is described on the COVID inspection page.
At portfolio scale, even two weeks matters. The cost is not evenly spread: it concentrates in the handful of properties with a developing issue that nobody sees in time.
Those are the least forgiving. HVAC before summer and winterisation before the cold have fixed deadlines that a suspension cannot negotiate with.
Entirely. Staff shortages, weather events and access refusals disrupt inspection schedules constantly. A method that does not depend on entry is robust against all of them.
Set up contactless periodic inspections so the next disruption costs you nothing.
