How to document apartment condition

Why it matters

Deposit disputes rarely turn on whether damage exists. They turn on when it appeared, and on who can show what the room looked like beforehand. Without a dated record from the day you took the keys, a scuffed floorboard or a cracked tile becomes your word against the landlord's — and the party holding the deposit is usually the one holding the money while it gets argued about.

A walkthrough recorded at handover changes that conversation. It does not make you right about everything, but it moves the question from "did you do this?" to "here is the room on the day I arrived" — which is a much shorter discussion.

It is worth knowing what deductions are actually made for. Of the deposit claims handled by The Deposit Protection Service in 2025, cleaning accounted for 29.38% and damage for 18.42% — and the damage share has climbed every year since 2021, when it was 14.60%. The reassuring part of the same data: fewer than 5% of protected deposits end in a dispute at all. Most tenancies end quietly; the record is for the ones that do not.

Source: The Deposit Protection Service, June 2026

When to document

There are three moments worth recording, and the first two are not optional.

• At move-in, before a single box goes in. Ideally the same day you collect the keys, and within 48 hours at the latest. Furniture hides floors and walls, which are exactly what gets charged for.
• At move-out, after cleaning and once the apartment is empty. Same rooms, same order, same level of detail.
• Whenever something changes mid-tenancy. A leak, a repair, an appliance that fails, damage a contractor causes. A short clip on the day beats a description months later.

What to capture, room by room

Work through the property in a fixed order and keep it consistent between the two visits, so each room has a matching pair. These are the items deductions are usually written about.

Houses, condos and shared buildings

Documenting a house or a condo works exactly like documenting an apartment — a continuous walkthrough of every room at move-in and again at move-out. There is simply more of it. A house adds outdoor space you will be charged for, and a condo adds fixtures that belong to the building rather than to the landlord, which is exactly where arguments start.

In a condo, note which fittings are the building's responsibility before you move in. When an A/C unit or a shared pipe fails mid-tenancy, who pays is much easier to settle if the handover record already shows what was installed and what state it was in.

How to film it so it stands up later

• One continuous take per room. An unbroken walk around the perimeter is harder to argue with than a folder of crops, because nothing can have been left out between shots.
• Move slowly. Two or three seconds on each wall. Footage that swings around the room too fast is unusable as evidence and unreadable to anyone reviewing it.
• Put the lights on and open the curtains. Marks that are invisible in dim footage cannot be pointed to afterwards.
• Narrate. Say the date, the room, and anything you notice — "chip on the left corner of the worktop, already there". Spoken context costs nothing and is recorded with the video.
• Get close, then pull back. A tight shot proves the damage; a wide shot proves where in the apartment it is. One without the other is weak.
• Do not trim or edit. The value of the file is that it is whole. Cut it and you invite the question of what was cut.

What makes the record credible

Anyone can film a room. What makes footage persuasive months later is everything around it.

• A date that is not just a filename. File timestamps can be changed, so the stronger position is a record held somewhere you do not control, or one whose contents are fingerprinted at the moment it is created.
• Matching pairs. The same rooms, filmed the same way at both ends of the tenancy, so the two can genuinely be compared rather than described.
• The whole room, not only the damage. Close-ups of five defects prove five defects. A full walkthrough proves the state of everything else too.
• Somebody else saw it at the time. Sending the footage or a report to the landlord or agent in the first week is the single cheapest thing you can do. A record they received then is far harder to dismiss than one produced during a dispute.
• A copy that is not only on your phone. Phones get lost, stolen and replaced, and footage that only exists in one place tends to stop existing.

Common mistakes

• Only photographing. Stills are fine as a supplement, but a photo shows one frame of one angle, chosen by you — which is exactly the objection it will meet.
• Filming after the furniture arrives. Whatever the sofa is standing on is the part you will be asked about.
• Documenting move-in and forgetting move-out. A before with no after proves only that the apartment once existed.
• Different rooms, different order, different detail. If the pair does not match, nothing can be compared.
• Relying entirely on the landlord's inventory. Read it, sign it if it is accurate, and write down your disagreements at the time — but keep your own record as well.
• Letting it expire. Keep everything until the deposit is actually back in your account, plus a margin for any dispute process.

Doing it with CompareAI Inspect

This is the job the app was built for, and it automates the parts people get wrong — the matching pairs, the fingerprinting, and the report at the end.

• Generate the room list first. Tell it the property type, levels and room counts and it creates a scan for each room, so you film a checklist instead of remembering one.
• Record Before now, After later. Each room is a named scan with two phases. At move-out you record the After against the same name, and the pair is matched automatically.
• The AI compares the two videos — the whole clip, not a frame — and reports what changed, with a location and a severity of minor, moderate or major for each finding.
• Export a PDF report. Per-room findings, thumbnails, capture dates, an optional location stamp, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of every video plus the report itself. Anyone can check that fingerprint at compareai.work/verify without seeing your footage.
• Send that report to the landlord in week one. It is a small PDF rather than a pile of video files, which is the difference between evidence that gets looked at and evidence that gets ignored.

Free accounts keep footage for 30 days and include five AI analyses a month; Pro keeps videos for 12 months, which is the one that matters for a tenancy. Exported PDFs are yours to keep either way — see pricing.

Questions people ask