The REAC Guru Bulletin Board

How long should a unit inspection take if we are being thorough?

Wow, that’s another hard one, it depends so much upon the size of the unit and the condition – but it
also depends on the purpose of the inspection. Elderly units in really good condition, as little as 2
minutes, and this assumes you spot check some items you expect to be fine. Larger family units like a 4
bedroom townhouse or rowhome in poor condition, I might spend 20 minutes in there if I was trying to catch
everything.

Frankly, when I do an inspection myself, I usually do it with the understanding between me and the
client that I am running through the units trying to balance our inspection time against the clock, trying
to find the highest scoring items that are easier to fix, and we are not trying to build a long list of routine
items that are low scoring and take a lot of time and money to fix. I rarely spend more than 3 to 5
minutes in a Unit, but I’m not doing a good general inspection, I’m doing a prioritized Pre REAC
inspection. I don’t care if the inspector finds a couple smoke detectors – we don’t lose any points for
that. I don’t care if the inspector finds a few closet doors off track, a few missing sink stoppers, a few
torn refrigerator gaskets. If I miss a few of those, no big deal. I don’t want the inspector to find any high
scoring items like the first 30% the hierarchy list I’m giving you.

On a routine maintenance inspection, you’ve got a different goal. You’re trying to assure resident
satisfaction therefore preserving occupancy, preservation of the value of the real estate asset,
protecting the ownership from liability, and more. Some people believe that every inspection should be
about detecting 100% of defects so you can achieve 100% perfection. Ask yourself this: When was the
last time you had to send all the maintenance people home because there was no work left to do? Yeah
– that happened, right? We will never achieve perfection – we have to decide where we achieve the
best balance. At some point, we get to what it takes twice as much money and time to achieve just a
slightly higher performance.

I’ve known of housing authorities that do not inspect units more than once or twice a year, because
their staff takes 2 hours to inspect a unit. (Frankly, these are people who are dragging their feet, taking
long breaks, long lunches, and maybe even doing paid side work during the course of the day instead of
what the housing authority is paying them to do. Some of these housing authorities have inspection
departments that have become entirely corrupt.)

You need to learn how to inspect quickly enough that you can inspect more often, but you need to
balance this against going so fast that you are missing stuff.