FIELD WORK · July 24, 2026
Photograph the problem, not the property
A rating without evidence is an opinion. Three shots per finding — context, defect, scale — make an audit reviewable by people who were never there.
Look through a hundred audit photos and most of them are of buildings. Nice, wide, establishing shots that prove the auditor was on site and prove nothing else. The photo that matters is the one of the thing that’s wrong.
Three shots per finding
- Context. Where is this? The corner of Building C, the stairwell landing, the third unit from the end. Someone reading the report next quarter needs to find it again.
- The defect. Close, filled frame, in focus. If you can’t tell what you’re looking at without the caption, retake it.
- Scale. A hand, a tape measure, a door frame. “A crack” and “a crack you can fit a pen into” are different findings with different price tags.
Three deliberate photos of one real problem beat twenty of a parking lot.
Photograph what you claim
If you rate the roof “needs repair,” there should be a picture of the roof. The rating is your judgment; the photo is the evidence that lets someone else reach the same judgment — or challenge it. Findings without evidence are the first ones argued away on the follow-up call, and usually the last ones fixed.
The inverse is just as true: don’t attach a photo that shows nothing. It teaches whoever reads your reports to stop opening them.
Use voice for what a photo can’t carry
Some things don’t photograph. A smell in a corridor. A compressor that only rattles under load. The fact that the manager mentioned this was reported in March. Say it out loud into a voice note while you’re standing there — you will not remember the detail at 6pm, and “musty smell, north stairwell, second floor” is worth more than a paragraph typed from memory that evening.
The takeaway
Capture as though the person deciding what to spend will never visit the property. They won’t. Your photos, your ratings, and thirty seconds of voice are the entire basis for a decision someone makes from a desk two hundred miles away.