Shoot short clips, not one long take. Ten to thirty seconds each, one per area, named for the area. That single decision is the difference between footage that gets used and footage that sits in a folder because nobody wants to scrub through it.
Everything below follows from that.
Why the one-take walkthrough fails
It looks efficient. You start at the front door, walk the whole unit narrating as you go, and finish with a single file covering everything.
Then a deduction gets questioned fourteen months later and you need eleven seconds showing the state of the guest bathroom tile. Those eleven seconds are somewhere in the middle of a nine-minute file, and finding them means watching until you hit them. Do that twice and you stop reaching for the video at all.
Short clips solve it because the filename does the searching. bath2-surround.mp4 is found
in one second. It also means a clip can be attached to the specific line of the condition
report it supports rather than to the report as a whole, which is how the footage stays
useful to somebody who was not there.
The route
Walk it the same way every time, in the same order as your condition report, so the video set and the report set line up without any work.
Start outside. Approach shot, the front of the building, the entry door, the unit number if there is one. That clip establishes which property everything after it belongs to, which matters more than it sounds when you own five units that were built by the same developer.
Then room by room in report order. Inside each room: one clip of the room from the doorway, then one clip for each area that needs a moving picture rather than a still.
Finish with the systems. Water heater, furnace, panel, meters, alarms.
What actually needs video
Most of a unit does not. Still photos are better for marks, stains, chips and scratches, because a viewer can hold on the image and see the detail.
Video earns its place on anything that has to be shown working:
- Faucets running hot and cold, and the drain clearing
- Toilets flushing and refilling
- Burners lighting, the oven heating, the range hood pulling
- Garbage disposal, dishwasher, washer and dryer starting
- Windows opening, closing and locking
- Doors swinging, latching and locking, including any sticking
- Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms responding to a test button
It also helps on anything a still could be accused of framing selectively. A slow pan across a full wall says “here is all of it” in a way a photo never quite does.
Narrate, but only facts
Say the address once at the start of the first clip, with the date. Then, in each clip, say which room and area you are in and what you are showing. Nothing else.
Good: “Second bathroom, tub surround, November fourteenth. Chip on the front edge, about an inch.”
Bad: anything with an opinion in it. Do not editorialize about the last tenant, do not speculate about what caused something, and do not say what you think it will cost to fix. You are on the recording too, and everything you say arrives with the footage.
If you are shooting with the tenant present, ask them to confirm out loud that they are there. A tenant’s voice on the clip is stronger corroboration than any timestamp.
Pacing and technique
Slow down. Most people shoot walkthroughs at about twice the speed the footage can carry, and the result is a blur that establishes nothing.
- Move at half your walking pace, and pause for two full seconds on anything you want visible.
- Hold the phone sideways rather than upright. Shooting tall crops out the walls on either side of what you are aiming at.
- Turn on every light in the room before you start, and shoot with the window at your back.
- Get within arm’s length of any defect. A mark filmed from six feet away is not in the footage in any meaningful sense.
- Do not use digital zoom. Walk closer.
- Keep clips between ten and thirty seconds. Under ten seconds is usually too fast to read; over thirty and you are back to scrubbing.
Ten to thirty seconds is also the window LeaseRooster accepts for a clip attached to a condition report area, and the ceiling is deliberate. A clip that runs longer is almost always covering more than one area and belongs to neither.
Naming and delivery
Same convention as your photos: area, then date. kitchen-range-2026-11-14.mp4. Same
folder as the report.
Video files are large, so the delivery method that works for photos may not work here. Sending forty megabytes of clips by text will compress them into uselessness. Attach them to the report itself, or put them somewhere the tenant can download the originals, and keep the record of when you sent them.
What video does not replace
It does not replace the written report. A rating and a note are searchable, sortable and comparable against a second report at move-out. Footage is none of those things.
It does not replace stills either, for the reasons above. The strongest file is all three: a rated line, a photo of the detail, and a clip where movement or function is the point. How to build the photo half is in your move-in photos are only evidence if you can find them, and the move-out side of the same routine is in the move-out inspection, done in the right order.
Condition reports in LeaseRooster hold both photos and short clips against the individual area they document, so a clip stays attached to the line it proves instead of floating in a folder.
This is general information, not legal advice. Rules change and local ordinances vary. Confirm current requirements with your city, county, or an attorney before you act.