Whether for letting, sale or management purposes, it is essential to manage your property for your customer or organisation.
This can mean inspecting it so that your business does not need to invest in repairs or as part of a pre-leasing rental agreement with a potential tenant. Letting a property for a tenant or performing mandatory building inspections follows the same basic principles of pre-use or within-use checks. Buildings need to adhere to legal safety standards for certain use, amongst general standards related to construction and upkeep.
Today many organisations who are managing their own property checks for commercial reasons or simply for regulatory purposes are using digital inspection applications. Industrial standards such as those published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), can be easily built into checklists so that the audit trail becomes much simpler. In such checklists, there can be specific sub-parts that directly conform the inspection to the standard’s inclusive points. Measurements and information can be recorded in standardised response boxes, via speech-to-text services or image attachments. As paperless applications use mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, the camera is as simple as the smartphone that employees use at home. Images can likewise be annotated to show certain features like mould growth directions or the wear or damage to a fire escape route.
Property inspection running on paperless solutions can also make use of the benefits of digital. By using a computerised maintenance management system (CMMS), digital inspection applications can make records accessible via a web-browser login 24/7 365 days a year. This gives access to historical tracking of all inspection types for a property, alongside any other inspections that need to be run for an organisation. Inspections can be categorised by asset or property which means the audit trail is highlighted for future use, and records and data can be easily cross compared. Any asset that is recorded in this way can benefit from data analytics as well as number-crunching from any other existing business intelligence that an organisation may already have. This gives many opportunities to make strategic decisions based of return on interest (ROI), relative to other assets/property.