S01E05 - Beyond the Frame: Unveiling the Power of 360-Degree Home Inspections

Transcript

Welcome to Moose Tales. I'm Jon with Two Moose Home Inspections and I have some short home inspection topics I want to discuss. So let's dive right in.

every home inspection as a standard, we take 360 degree photos of every room of the house and the exterior and the attic space and the crawl space and the roof and underneath the deck.

And that's just what we do. And so before we jump into the why, let's first understand what a 360 degree camera is. So I think that a lot of us have all taken regular photos and they're normally in some kind of aspect ratio, meaning that they are either tall, which would be portrait or they are like horizontal and wide, which would be a landscape.

And if you use something like a panoramic mode or string a bunch of photos together, you can get a panorama. And a panorama will basically show you a really, really wide photo. And there are lenses that allow that to happen. They would be referred to as fisheye lenses, basically because a fish's eye allows the fish to basically see 360 degrees around it or each eye about 180 degrees.

And it also that fish I kind of bulges out away from its body and is just like a half sphere. And so when we talk about a 360 degree camera, each lens is a fisheye lens or a very wide angle lens, and it is able to see from the ground all the way up to the ceiling, and it's able to see all the way to the left and all the way to the right.

And in fact, it sees a little bit more than 180 degrees at all angles. And 180 degrees are just mean, are completely flat from one side to the other. It actually sees wider than that. And so whenever you put two lenses back to back on a device that allows you to stitch together using these two panoramic photos, effectively stitch together a photo or photograph that allows you to then in a virtual world, if you want to think of it in that way, you can move a virtual camera up or down, left, right, as if you were standing in that one spot and you would be able to look up, down, left, right in every single

direction. So why is it important to have 360 degree cameras for our inspections? And the reason why is because there's a thing called CYA, or Cover your ass. What does this mean? Well, it just means that with every business,

everybody is worried about some kind of legal action being taken against them.

And what we want to try to do is limit that as much as possible. And so what used to happen and what we used to do as home inspectors is we would go into a house and then we take the CYA photos. And that would mean I walk into a room, I go to a corner, I take a picture presenting over to, let's just say, the north side of the house.

Then I go over to that side of the house. I turn around and I take a picture presenting the south side of the house, and I have to do that for every single room. Now, does that have to happen? No. And in fact, some home inspectors are using body camera footage to show what they were doing and yada, yada, yada.

Now, that's a whole other thing. On whether or not that's something that you want to be doing from a privacy standpoint, whether that's something you want to be doing from a long term storage standpoint. And I don't necessarily know if body worn cameras are the most appropriate thing for a home inspector to be using as a cover your ass kind of a product.

Because the reality is, is that I don't think anybody should be questioning what you as the home inspector, were doing while you were there. What they should be questioning is what was the condition of the house. So whenever we take these 360 degree photos, we set the tripod in an area and it's basically a tripod with a long pole.

And we have that 360 degree camera. We snap a photo, we move to the next spot before we even start inspecting the property. We're going to take that picture with a 360 degree camera because before we step foot into anything or start modifying or touching or doing anything, we want a picture of the condition of the property at the time of the inspection.

And so that's what the 360 degree camera allows us to do. So it sounds cumbersome, but where this all originated was I was in my first year of home inspecting years back, and I had my first ever 6000 square foot house and I was like, my gosh, how am I going to take all these CYA photos? Like I was already tracking how many photos were taken per house?

And I was like, That's that. Already we're averaging 500 photos per house. That's insanity. I think it was like 536 photos per house on average. And the average house size was somewhere between two and 3000 square feet, you know, and that's with every single deficiency, every single cover your butt photo, all that kind of stuff. And so when I was presented with this 6000 square foot house, I'm like, there's no way I need technology to be able to do this for me.

So if we assume that that a truly well-done CYA photo would mean that if you were in a perfectly square room because of how not wide angle most camera lenses are, you need to be taking a photo from each corner of that room. And so that would end up being four photos per room. And that's a minimum. If the room is L-shaped, well, then you might end up taking five or six photos per room.

And so I said, there has to be a way in. So we got the 360 degree cameras. We started using those and that was amazing.

you can set a 360 degree camera right in the middle of the room, snap the photo and move to the next. It snaps a photo almost as quickly as a normal camera would.

And so then you can just set it in a room and go, So if you had ten rooms instead of having to take a minimum of 40 photos as a minimum, you're actually going to be taking just ten photos. And so it is a huge reduction in work. And what's really, really great about that is that you get a lot of unforeseen benefits, such as you might be in a crawl space and you've reached the limitation of how far you can go.

Well,

with an extendable pole, you have a 360 degree camera that you can then put ten feet further into the crawl space than where you were. And because they're amazing at lowlight, because we do an HDR photograph, which means that we basically set it that it's going to take a photo as a really dark photo that is just, you know, not really bringing a whole bunch of lights that way.

If, let's say we're directly in the sunlight, it's basically toning down that photo and then we take a photo, the fifth photo, which all happens instantaneously, that one is several stops higher. And what that means is that if we were out in the normal daylight, everything would be blown out and we would be just, you know, way too way too bright.

But what that allows us to do is that whenever we have that HDR photo out in the bright sunlight, we can see those really, really dark shadows and we aren't blown out by the sunlight in a dark spot. We can see we can really brighten up those shadows and the whole photo just looks amazing. So HDR photo is the way to go, but basically we can push that camera way far ahead of us and we're able to see things that we otherwise wouldn't be able to see because of physical limitations.

Same with underneath decks. Also, whenever we're inspecting roofs, we can have that ten foot pole in our hands and we can have it 360 degree image all the way around us, live streaming through Wi-Fi to our iPads, and we're able to just zoom in, zoom out scroll. I like pan left, pan right, tilt up, tilt down, and we're able to see what we wouldn't be able to see for certain roof inspections.

And so in our area, a lot of times the roofs are covered with snow and ice dams and it just makes it unsafe to set up a ladder to get up onto roofs. So this is a great alternative. Same with attic space. Sometimes you can't get to every corner of an attic space. Sometimes you see something. You're like, I wish I could just have a different vantage point, just a little bit further away.

And then there you go. So how does this work for CYA? Is it good? Is it any good? Well, yeah, it's amazing. So if we talk about customers, we have had several times that this has really, really benefited us. One time we had a person say, well, you did reset the blinds the way they were and I can't do this.

And, you know, yadda, yadda, yadda. There was a whole bunch of other stuff that that went on in the blinds is just one example. And it's an easy one to get into. And so we say, hey, well, before we even touch anything, we take 360 degree photos of the house. The only thing that we're touching as we walk through the house is light switches, the turn on lights.

And so here is the condition of the house. Whenever we first arrived, I'm not sure how the blinds got up. I'm sorry that the blinds were up, but we returned them to the up position after we tested them, because that's how they were when they're like, yeah, okay, fine. They were. And then we had another customer who was like, You guys completely trashed our house.

Well, as you might have suspected, the house was already completely trashed. They had personal items everywhere. It just it looked like a bomb had gone off. It was just such a dirty, nasty gross house

and they tried to discredit us and say, well, you guys, you know, just totally just threw my personal items everywhere or whatever you're inspecting and that's not cool and yada, yada, yada.

Well, here's kind of what we find out, is that whenever a home inspector goes and does a home inspection, sometimes the people selling the house have to fix things that they don't want to fix because the home inspector found it. And sometimes people say, well, if I can discredit the home inspector, I'm going to discredit the home inspector, because if I can discredit the home inspector, then well, they, you know, can't even be trusted to do this.

You're home, Inspector. You know, like you actually might owe me money for. For all the stuff that the home inspector, you know, messed up. And so if I can discredit the home inspector, then maybe I don't have to pay for these couple of hundred dollars worth of repairs or maybe a couple thousand dollars worth of repairs. And so in an attempt to discredit home inspectors, we have our 360 degree photos, along with our final checklist, final video, all of these things to basically say now we did what we were supposed to do.

So there's one here that I have written down, and it was like they missed the leak. And the answer is yes. Yes, we did. We most certainly did. But we're not the ones that you want to talk to. There was this room and, you know, these people were moving out of the house and so they were packing up their boxes and, my gosh, it was like, hey, just so you know, home inspectors, we you know, we're packing up our house.

Sorry, it's a little bit of a mess. You know, we're just really packing up the house and trying to get everything in boxes so we can get out and go, okay, great. Yeah, we're getting everything in boxes so you can get out and go. There was this one room where they just had a pile of boxes just a pile of boxes right up against the wall.

It was kind of just weird, you know? It's just weird. But we had 360 degree photos of all of that. And whenever the people went back to the house after they moved out, there was just this huge water stain and rot. And like even the baseboard trim was rotting out. And yeah, I mean, we didn't see it.

And that's strange because why didn't we see it? Why? Well, we didn't see it because the seller and this is, you know, no libel, no slander, no nothing. You don't even know who this who this seller is. So I can say anything and we're fine. But the seller purposefully took those boxes and put them in front of an ongoing issue that had clearly been going on for a long period of time.

And that issue was actually in a basement level. And the issue was actually a grading issue that caused excessive levels of water to come down because there was an issue with I mean, there aren't really gutters in our area because of ice dams and other things like that. But basically there was a grading issue. Water was coming down to the foundation and leaking in through this point and had been going on for so long that had rotting away, even the base trim, yada, yada, yada.

They didn't want to pay for it. They wanted to kick the can down the road. And so they ended up putting boxes in front of it. So then what do we say is home inspectors say on the day of the inspection, look at this, How would we have seen it? And who do you need to be talking to?

You and your realtor need to be talking to the other realtor and the seller because there was a failure to disclose something that they were required to disclose. And we're just going to just have nothing to do with that. And we had nothing to do with that. And so, yeah, the CYA photos completely worked to a tee. And so it's really important as a home inspector, not that we're like afraid of liability and we're afraid of all these other things because that's what we have insurance for.

But sometimes people, especially whenever finances are involved, have a lot of outside influences and a lot of scarcity. And we have to recognize that people are people and nobody's bad. Nobody's good, we just are. And sometimes to try to take advantage of the situation, they may try to discredit a home inspector. So it's very, very important that we do cover our ass in 360 degree photos are great.

So in addition to that, one else are the three or 60 degree photos. Great. Well, they're amazing if you're going to be doing a remodel, because who gets these photos? Well, the people that buy the home inspection get these photos. They can then say, I'm buying this house sight unseen, and I can't really remember this room. Boom, There's your 360 degree photos.

Hey, I don't remember what color this room was. I don't remember what the decorations were. Or I had one person that was like, man, I just love the decorations that they did here. They're taking all of the stuff. It was like very like rustic, you know, kind of stuff. Like, like obviously moose, you know, there's a lot of moose everywhere.

There were antlers. There was like, all this really, really cool stuff, old snow shoes, like all the stuff. And they're like, I just love the way they did the design. But unfortunately, they're taking all their stuff and I want it to look very similar and boom, there you go. You got your 360 degree photos ready to rock and roll for you.

We had a lady that did a whole bunch of remodels, and so then she ended up taking those 300 degree photos and then panning to where the 360 view was pretty good off having a picture right there. And they can say this is what this room used to look like and this is what it looks like now. So 360 degree photos are not only great for us also from the standpoint of, man, you know, I said that there was an issue with this window, but I never got like a far away ten foot view of the window.

So you could see the issue. Like I only got the close up. Well, the great thing is with that 360 degree camera, now I can just take a little snipping tool, snip that out of that photo and put that into the inspection report. You know, I couldn't get all the way underneath that deck, but I can see that we have an issue with that joist hanger and boom right there in the three and 360 degree photo.

I can take that and put it into the inspection report. So it's amazing for us not just from a CYA tool, but also from a let's enhance the quality of the inspection report tool, also from a here customer. Here's a bunch of resource for you. So that way you can remember what it used to look like after, you know, before you had done the remodel.

You have the ability to take a look at it before you close on the house to remember the things that that you really, really liked about this house. Because we take the photos on the exterior of the interior and again, the roof attic crawl space and underneath the decks. And so we got it all. And so then since the client has access to those photos, one of the things you might want to think about this if you're a home inspection business, is one of the things that we do is that we actually put in our pre inspection agreement.

We put in a media release that basically says, Hey, once we send you guys this home inspection report and you have access to these photos, we can't guarantee what's happening with those photos. And also like if we want to use it for promotional materials or yada, yada, yada, that that's okay as well. But the main thing is, is that if you get that inspection report and your realtor gets that inspection report, then their whole office has that inspection report and you send it over to your aunt or your uncle.

Now they have the inspection report and they have access to all of those photos. And once they do, I can't say where it goes. So let's say hypothetically that you were talking to an interior design company, and the interior design company now has access to those photos and they're doing a before and after and they take those photos for their before and then they and they're putting in some like advertising for them about before and afters.

Well, are you going to come back to two movies, home inspections and say, I can't believe that you gave them that photo? Well, we didn't we didn't give them that photo. It happened whenever you sent them the inspection report or you send them the 360 degree photos to say, hey, I really want to work with my interior designer.

Here's the space that we have here is the idea, Hey, I really want to work with this contractor. Here's how I want to redo this particular room. Here's how I want to add the additions, yada, yada, yada. Now, I really think you should share those things. But what I'm saying is, from a home inspection business standpoint, I think it's extremely important to make sure that you have protections in your pre inspection agreement that say we have no control these photos once we send them to you and we aren't just going to give them to people willy nilly because you, the client, are paying for the inspection and therefore we work for you and this

belongs to you. If somebody gets that home inspection or sorry, it gets to the same house and they want that home inspection report that we did. Sorry, buddy, you are the one that paid for it. They're the ones who paid for it. You got to talk to them because that has nothing to do with us. So anyway, I think basically the three 360 degree camera is one of the best investments that we've ever made for the business.

Every inspector has one and there are a lot of different makes and models and a lot of updates that come annually. And so I would just say, get the best you can. and the last thing on this is that we also ended up doing 360 degree virtual tours using Matterport. The problem was that in our area, it just maybe was the way the market was, maybe is whatever.

But Matterport didn't really pan out as a side hustle type thing where we can have inspectors then turning this around and really getting an amazing product for our pre listing inspections where, you know, the house is about to go on the market and now we can have an entire 3D digital twin, you know, a whole like dollhouse view, whatever of that property.

And with Matterport like amazing product, totally great. But I just think with how red hot the market was whenever we roll this out, maybe it just wasn't the best time, but we still have the capability with those 360 degree cameras that if we ever wanted to go back and do that, we have all of our training, we have all of our soap, everything in the way in which we do these things.

And it's literally as simple as turning that service back on. And that's something we can offer to our customers. Let's say if the housing market points in the direction of more pre listing inspections than what we've had in our area. But that's another benefit to the 360 degree camera is that you can then have a secondary income stream potentially if your market is able to support it with pre listing inspections.

So yeah, that's a POD.