How to write a site inspection report
A site inspection report records what a building looked like on a particular day, to somebody qualified to judge it. Its readers were not there. Some of them will read it months or years later, and at least one of them may be reading it because something has gone wrong. Write for that reader and the rest takes care of itself.
Structure
The order below is conventional because it works — each section answers the question the previous one raises.
- Header. Site address, date and time of inspection, weather if it is relevant to what you saw, who attended, who the report is for, and a revision number.
- Scope and limitations. What you inspected and — critically — what you did not. Areas locked, concealed, occupied or unsafe to access belong here. This paragraph is what stops your report being read as a warranty on things you never saw.
- Summary. The handful of things the reader must act on, in priority order. A busy client reads this and nothing else.
- Findings. The numbered body of the report, one item per defect, ordered so somebody can follow them round the building.
- Photographs. Referenced against item numbers, not dumped in an appendix nobody can map back.
- Next steps. What happens now, by whom, by when.
Describing a defect so it gets fixed
Most poor reports fail on a single sentence. Compare:
"Bathroom needs attention." — Which bathroom, what is wrong with it, how urgent, and what would "attended to" look like? The person receiving this has to come and ask, which costs a day and some goodwill.
"Apartment 4, en-suite: silicone seal to the shower tray/wall junction has failed along the full length of the west side, with staining to the plasterboard below indicating water tracking behind the tray. Re-seal required, and moisture check to the adjacent wall build-up before making good." — Location, defect, evidence, and the fact that a second, hidden problem may exist.
Practical rules:
- Describe the condition, not the fix. Record what is wrong; recommend separately. Prescribing a remedy you have not designed can transfer liability to you.
- Say where, precisely. "Second floor" is not a location. Room, elevation and a dimension from a fixed point is.
- Distinguish observation from inference. "Staining consistent with a historic leak" is honest. "There is a leak" is a conclusion you may not be able to support.
- Prioritise. Safety-critical, weather-tightness and progress-blocking items are not the same as decoration, and a flat list buries them.
What the photographs need to show
A close-up of a crack could be any wall in any building. Take two: one wide enough to locate it, one close enough to show it. Include something for scale on anything where size matters. If you mark up the image, mark it clearly — an arrow drawn on the photo is worth a paragraph of description.
Pinning defects to the actual floor plan solves the location problem better than either photograph or prose. A reader sees at a glance where the fifteen items are, which cluster together, and which part of the building is in trouble.
Issue it properly
A report that exists in four slightly different versions is worse than no report. Number revisions, date them, and make it obvious which is current. When you re-inspect, issue a new revision of the same report with the same item numbers rather than a fresh document — the value is in being able to see that item 9 has been open since March.
This is the part that fails most often in practice, because it is administrative rather than technical. Snagger issues each inspection as a numbered revision of the same report, with pins on your own drawing, photographs attached to the items they belong to, and a PDF you can hand over before leaving site.