Room checks
Inspecting a room between residents.
A room check is the inspection between one resident leaving and the next arriving. It is assigned to you like a cleaning event, and you accept or decline it the same way — see Your cleaning events.
What you record feeds the departing resident's deposit settlement. It is read by people who were not there, sometimes weeks later, and sometimes while disagreeing with the resident about money. Write it for that reader.
Record what changed, not what is imperfect
Compare against the room's move-in condition record where one exists. Your job is to identify what changed during this tenancy.
A mark that was there when the resident arrived is not theirs. Listing it anyway is worse than saying nothing: it makes the whole report look careless, and one demonstrably unfair item is enough for a resident to reject the parts that were fair.
Normal wear is not damage. A room that has been lived in for two years is expected to look lived in.
Photograph everything you describe
A sentence without a photograph is an opinion. A photograph without a sentence is ambiguous. Together they are evidence.
- Photograph the whole of anything you are flagging, then close up. A tight crop of a stain proves it exists but not where or how big.
- Photograph the room generally too, not only the problems. A settlement is easier to defend when the report shows the room as it was overall.
Be specific
"Kitchen dirty" cannot be priced, defended or fixed. "Grease on the extractor hood and the wall behind the hob, not removable with normal cleaning" can be all three.
Say where it is, what it is, and — if you can tell — whether it can be cleaned or needs replacing. You are not deciding the money; you are giving the person who does something they can act on.
If the room is fine
Say so, clearly, and photograph it anyway.
A clean check is a useful result: it is what lets a deposit be returned in full quickly and without argument. An empty report is not the same thing — it reads as a check that never happened.
Timing
Do the check before cleaning where you can, or record the state you found before you change it. Once you have cleaned, evidence of what the resident left behind is gone, and the settlement loses the thing it needed.
If you are doing both in one cleaning event, photograph first.
See also Completing a cleaning event.