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April 2020 was a bumper month for inspections improvements in Console Cloud. While some inspections improvements had been planned for, others sprang from the need to adapt to strict lockdown orders amid Coronavirus concerns.
Let’s take a tour.
We were asked this question a lot in March. Navigating the uncharted territory of the COVID-19 pandemic has not been easy for most agencies. On top of social distancing restrictions, however, property managers still needed to comply with management agreements and legislation around routine inspections.
To help property managers stay compliant and above all safe, we built a tenant self inspection option for conducting routine reports remotely. This feature is now live and ready for you to start using in Console Cloud.
In the Inspections tab in Console Cloud, you can now see an option to create a routine self inspection for tenants to conduct remotely on your behalf. Generating a self inspection will email a set of instructions and an online form for your tenants to complete.
Tenants can then conduct the inspection remotely by completing the form and attach up to five photos per room. Note that tenants won’t be able to see past inspections data using this form. The inspection form they see will match their property's attributes, as per your last routine inspection.
It’s also worth noting that if your agency has not completed a routine inspection under the current tenant agreement before, your tenants will see the default property layout. Tenants can simply skip rooms that do not apply to them.
When they submit the form, it will sync to Console Cloud as a tenant self inspection report. You can then edit the report if necessary.
You bet! While an element of trust is involved in putting a routine inspection in your tenants’ hands, you’re not stuck with their assessment. If you spot property damage or pick up an error in your tenant’s inspection report, you can simply click into the report and edit it.
It’s not just tenant self inspections that you can edit—it’s all past routine inspections completed in Console Cloud. This brand new feature was hotly requested, but we released it a fraction sooner than we had planned to, to help agencies enabling tenants to self-inspect (and therefore needing that edit button right now).
The ability to edit past inspections is also our first Console Labs project. Console Labs projects focus on releasing some features to our customers earlier, so we can give you more tools to play with, and also so we can get your feedback earlier on in the development process. You can expect to see more Console Labs projects in the future.
Have a go, and let us know what you think! Remember, you can always up-vote or give suggestions for new features.
We’ve partnered with the team behind the much-loved inspections software, Inspection Manager. According to Console Chief Product Officer Matt McGown, “Inspection Manager is an expert in its own field. But the efficiencies gained by using both Console Cloud and Inspection Manager were lost so long as those systems didn’t talk to each other. That’s why we felt it was important to build this integration—to keep reducing that time and admin load for customers.”
If you’re a fan of Inspection Manager, you can link your account to your Console Cloud office. Here’s how: go to the Marketplace tab in Console Cloud, and activate the Inspection Manager integration by clicking on the tile. Once you’ve linked your accounts, any inspections you schedule in Console Cloud will sync automatically and instantly with Inspection Manager.
Linking accounts means you can conduct inspections using Inspection Manager. When you’re ready to finish up, your finalised report will sync back into Console Cloud. Please note however that you will still need to schedule and manage your inspection notices in Console Cloud.
While the pandemic will end sooner or later, we believe the utility of these new features will endure into the future. They’ve been designed to suit a variety of conditions, and improve the ease, flexibility, and experience of conducting inspections for property managers.
Like everything we do in Console Cloud, these features are built for property management—not just for now, but for the future.
