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How to Create a Home Inspection Report Template
Spectora
6/16/22 11:04 AM
Trust me, I get it — you’re an inspector, not a writer.
If you're like most home inspectors, writing inspection reports is one of the least enjoyable parts of your job.
After a long day spent on inspections, the last thing you want to do is spend another 2-3 hours documenting everything you did throughout the day. At the same time, reporting is a necessary evil for all inspectors.
So how do you make reports easier without compromising any of the details for your clients? By designing and using a home inspection report template.
A report template will give you a streamlined process for writing your reports and help you stay on brand so you aren’t reinventing the wheel every time you need to write a new one.
Even better, you can generate reports on-site during inspections so you can gain those precious after-work hours back in your life!
Whether you're a veteran or new to the home inspection industry, here are some tips and tricks to creating a thorough home inspection report template.
When you have a pre-built template to generate reports from (especially paired with a mobile tool you can use in the field), the time it takes to populate reports can be virtually eliminated from your daily routine.
Not sure where to start? Here are some tips to help you design your own home inspection report template:
Included on the cover page should be your client's information as well as your own. This makes it clear who you prepared the report for and who you are. Most importantly, including your information keeps you in their minds for future referrals.
Including a summary at the beginning of the report is helpful for those clients who don’t have the time to sit down and read through multiple pages of the inspection report.
This should include any major issues, when they need to be addressed, and how much it could cost them. This section will make it easy for your client to understand the important information.
The average attention span of a person lasts eight seconds, which means you probably won’t even get this far into the article :)
But it also means that people need information quickly and efficiently.
Inspection reports have to be detailed in order to give your clients the full picture of the home you’re inspecting. However, you can include these details with other elements that cater to this short attention span:
See what we did there?
Things will need to be fixed, and giving agents quick access to schedule work saves them time and makes you a hero. With tools like repair request builders, agents can share a repair request document with an outside service provider straight from the report itself including all of the information you noted about the problem.
Don’t forget to include contact information at the end of the report! That makes it easy for your clients to get in touch with you if they have any questions after going through the report without having to sift through old emails and phone calls.
While this list above is a great place to start with your template, there are some other features that will help your report stand out from your competitors:
Pre-Created Templates — Don’t start from scratch! Use a pre-built template that you can customize to make your own.
When you streamline your home inspection process, you’ll spend less time on the mundane, and free up more time to take on additional jobs or focus on life outside of the office.
One of the best ways to do exactly that is to use a leading software to custom-design your own home inspection report template or use a premade one.
Spectora makes it easy to customize your templates while writing reports for different kinds of customers. This feature allows you to add sections, items, defects, or comments to your template in real-time.
Try Spectora now for free to discover how our simple interface makes home inspection easy and fun.