AI driven photography can help with rental housing inspections, walkthroughs and more creating more accuracy and efficiency for property managers.
By Paul Bergeron
The blending of mobile maintenance platforms, AI-driven photography, and voice-activated commands has merged, bringing greater accuracy and efficiency to inspections and walk-throughs for the apartment industry.
Maintenance technicians, their supervisors, and on-site teams have moved to these more efficient models, and now tenants are joining in.
They can use their mobile devices (via a web application, no separate download needed) to walk through a property guided by voice and video prompts.
Using AI-driven computer-vision technology that can see and understand what it sees and hears, Paraspot AI, a firm recently acquired by AppWork, scans footage to identify visible issues such as cracks, stains, broken fixtures, and missing inventory.
The technology enables residents to do the walkthroughs themselves, which frees the property management team’s accounting department to handle security deposits end to end without involving site staff.
At move-out, the system pulls up the unit’s original move-in inspection and lines it up side by side to detect what changed. The result is a complete inspection report with time-stamped photos, clear descriptions, and estimated repair costs.
That level of detail gives operators documentation to support security deposit charges, so residents are billed only for damage they’re responsible for, supporting security deposit decisions and compliance requirements (such as California’s AB 2801).
California’s AB 2801 has set new documentation standards for inspections, a direction more states are expected to follow. Inspection data can now flow directly into features that property teams already use, including the make-ready board, so inspections will connect to the workflow instead of sitting apart from it.
Southern California based owner Windell Mollenido, vice President of marketing and technology at The REMM Group, AMO, said, “You want to find smoke before there’s fire. Even if I find something that’s wrong it forces you to at least check it. If just one out of the 10 things that it finds is real, worth all the money to me.
“I’m saving money on unit turns and rehabs, and preserving the overall integrity of the property. It also make sure that I’ve captured the right amount of security deposit from the renter during a move out.”
Mollenido said inspections are no longer about trying to find a needle in a haystack.
“If you have the right KPIs, data and the technology is trained, you enter a world where the asset walks are supported by AI,” he said.
He said, typically, when walking a property, everyone has a different experience.
“I’m usually looking up at roofs, not for slab leaks,” he said. “This technology will call out everything. You can tell you if the cabinet is crooked or floorboard is missing or there’s paint discoloration on the wall.”
Inspections can be manual and tedious, and there’s no uniformity, Dovi Friedman, Regional Manager, Rushmore Management, said.
“If the person doing them is detail oriented, they will find a lot more than those who aren’t,” he said.
“We operate 24,500 units and are growing so we leverage technology anyway we can. We try everything that’s out there. We used Paraspot at three properties a year ago. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes to video a home. It will catch scratches on the wall or carpet stains that saves us a lot of time and money. It’s creates consistent level of catching things and helps us to bill back the residents accurately.”
Paraspot AI is trained on millions of data points from thousands of multifamily, single-family, and student housing inspections.
AppWork plans to rebuild Paraspot’s technology directly into its own system and architecture, with a release planned later this year.
About the author:
Paul Bergeron is a freelance writer who covers the multifamily industry
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