Better Rental Inspections
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What is the focus of the podcast episode with Hayley Mitchell?
It's The Real Estate Podcast, brought to you by Ray White, the largest real estate and property group in Australasia.
And welcome to another episode of The Real Estate Podcast. We're talking to Hayley Mitchell from Mitchell PT. Welcome to The Real Estate Podcast, Hayley.
Thanks for having me.
Great to have you on again. A lot of our listeners, as we mentioned previously, have rental properties. Some elect to self-manage them. Others have companies like yourself and people doing that aspect for them. I wanted to sort of have a look at the inspection process itself, like remote routine inspections that were being carried out. under the tight COVID conditions in terms of lockup. What was that involving in terms of the remote routine inspections?
Yeah, we had to pivot pretty quickly on that one, actually, because all of a sudden we weren't allowed to do our inspections of properties. And that's such a big part of what we do to ensure that the property is well managed and that the renters are looking after it well and it's kept neat and clean. And also to see if any maintenance issues as well. And An example of that is I remember I managed property years ago and this renter was amazing. She was just, her property looked like a, I don't know, design home. It was just beautiful every time you went through. And my owner actually said, don't worry about doing two inspections a year. She's perfect. And I said to him, yeah, but what if there's maintenance and it's not picked up by her?
So, and it was funny, the next routine I did, there had actually been a roof leak. and she hadn't noticed it. And I said to the owner, you've got a roof leak. This is why we go through every six months to make sure that the property is well maintained and there's no issues. So all of a sudden, if we're not allowed to go in and look at properties, we still want to make sure that we are, I guess, casting our eye over the property. So a lot of the software providers came out with the ability to do a remote routine inspection, which means that we would send a link to our renters. Our renters would do the inspection themselves on their phone. They'd take photos, they'd write notes, they'd report any maintenance and they'd send that back to the agent.
And at the beginning of COVID, a lot of property managers said, oh, COVID won't be around for long. We won't worry about implementing the software. We'll just wait till we can do in-person inspections again.
How did COVID-19 impact rental property inspections?
And those agencies now have a massive backlog of inspections to catch up with. And, you know, although the remote routine inspection is not the same as going through the property physically and having a look yourself, it was really interesting. The quality of reports that came back from renters was actually really good. And if there was an issue that a property manager could see during that inspection, they could then obviously organise a follow-up inspection once COVID was over. So I think it was just really important for us to still be able to do that particular task.
You know, it's interesting, as you say, because it was a detailed kind of a report. It almost needs to be amalgamated in some way. Like when we return to normal, maybe you can pivot with that branch of extra reporting. I don't know. Is that helpful? Useful?
Yeah, well, I have spoken to quite a few agents that said that potentially what they might do is do the two in-person inspections. And this is obviously in Victoria. We can only go through twice a year.
What are remote routine inspections and how do they work?
So do the two inspections in the first year. And then in the second year, if a renter is still staying on and they're a fantastic long-term renter, maybe do one in-person inspection. and one remote routine inspection as well, so that you're still looking at the property twice a year, but you're not necessarily interrupting a long-term perfect tenant every six months. So I think there will be a few changes like that coming through in the future with some agencies.
Takes a pandemic to improve the reporting, Hayley.
sure does and some of the reports that the renters did i've got a property in geelong west and the report she sent back i have to say was more detailed than what my property manager was doing so you know often you've got these renters that actually can take that detail because they live in the property every day so yeah it was really interesting seeing the quality of reports that came back
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