Move-in inspection

Move-in inspection, defined: the signed, dated record of a rental property's condition on the day the tenant takes the keys.

A move-in inspection is a walk-through of a rental property at the start of a tenancy, in which the landlord or agent and the tenant record the condition of every room, fixture and fitting, with photos and a written checklist that both sign. The term is North American; in the UK and Ireland the same document is a check-in report, usually built on the inventory report.

The record matters more than the walk-through. When the tenant leaves, every deduction from the deposit is measured against what the property looked like on day one. If that baseline is thin, undated or unsigned, the deduction fails, whatever the carpet looks like now.

What a move-in inspection covers

Room by room, in the same order every time:

• Walls, ceilings and floors: marks, scuffs, stains, cracked tiles, worn carpet, with a close-up of anything already damaged.
• Fixtures and appliances: oven, hob, fridge, boiler, extractor, taps and toilet flush, each tested and photographed.
• Doors, windows and locks: whether they close, lock and seal, and how many keys were handed over.
• Meters: gas, electricity and water readings, photographed with the serial number in frame.
• Safety equipment: smoke and carbon monoxide alarms tested, with the test date written down.
• Cleanliness: described in plain words ("professionally cleaned", "dust on skirting in bedroom two"), because "clean" on its own gets argued about later.
• Garden, garage and outbuildings where they form part of the let.

The tenant then gets a short window, set by the agreement or by local rules, to add comments before the record counts as agreed. Some US states and Canadian provinces require a signed move-in condition report by law. In the UK it is not a statutory document, but the deposit protection schemes treat it as the central piece of evidence whenever a deduction is claimed.

How a move-in inspection works in practice

Three ways it gets done. An agent or independent inventory clerk visits before the keys go over and produces the report. The landlord and tenant walk the property together on moving day and fill in a checklist. Or the tenant is sent a guided capture link and records the condition themselves in the first days, with the landlord reviewing the submission and adding anything missed.

The third route is growing because it fixes a timing problem. The clerk's visit rarely lands on the same day as the tenant, and a tenant who walks in three days after the report finds things the clerk never saw. Tenant-led capture puts the record on the day it matters, and a tenant who took the photos cannot later argue they were staged.

Move-in inspection example: the scratched worktop

A two-bedroom flat, a new tenant, and an agent report done the previous Thursday. The tenant moves in on Saturday, spots a long scratch across the kitchen worktop, photographs it on the phone and emails the agent on Monday. Eighteen months later the landlord claims for a replacement worktop.

The move-in report says "worktop: good condition". The tenant's Monday email, with the photo and its date, says otherwise. The adjudicator sides with the tenant on that item: the landlord's own report is silent on the scratch, the tenant's photo is dated inside the first week, and nobody can prove it came later. Had the tenant been asked to capture the kitchen on Saturday as part of the check-in, the scratch would have sat in the agreed baseline and there would have been nothing to argue.

What a move-in inspection does not do, and the mistakes people make

It does not set the standard the property has to come back in. Fair wear and tear, the gradual decline from normal living, always comes off what a landlord can claim. A pristine baseline still leaves a reasonable-use allowance at the end.

It does not prove when later damage happened. It proves what was there on day one, and nothing after that. The mid-tenancy inspection and the move-out inspection fill in the rest of the timeline.

The mistakes that lose deposit claims:

• Twelve wide-angle photos of empty rooms and no close-ups. Nobody can judge a skirting board from the doorway.
• An unsigned report with no proof it was ever sent to the tenant. It carries far less weight than one the tenant saw and had the chance to comment on.
• Reports typed up days later from memory.
• Meter readings written down but not photographed.
• A move-out done on a different form with different wording, so the two records cannot be laid side by side.

Where the move-in record goes

Both parties keep a copy from day one. In England and Wales the tenancy deposit itself sits in one of three government-backed schemes (TDS, DPS or mydeposits), and if the parties cannot agree deductions at the end, the scheme's adjudicator decides on the paperwork alone: move-in record, move-out record, tenancy agreement, dated photos, invoices. Nobody visits the property. Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own schemes on the same principle, and in Ireland the Residential Tenancies Board handles deposit disputes. The burden of proof sits with whoever wants to deduct, so the landlord's move-in record is the document doing the work.

Related entries: check-out report, security deposit, and the move-out inspection and inventory report (tenancy) entries in this glossary. For the tenant-led version in detail, see tenant self-inspection.

Venta Capture, a product of VentaVid, is one way to run the tenant-led route: the tenant is sent a secure, personal capture link, follows the guided steps in the mobile browser with no app and no account, and the submission arrives timestamped and sealed for the landlord or agent to review, with a copy that can go back to the tenant so both sides hold the same record. Details at the Venta Capture pages.

In practice: see how guided video capture works in Venta Capture.