Property inspection companies check homes, buildings and sites before purchase, handover or repair. This is how to run inspectors, report writers and schedulers when a missed defect can land back on the firm.
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Share your requirementsA property inspection company sends trained inspectors to examine flats, villas, offices and commercial buildings for buyers, developers, banks or owners. Inspectors check structure, damp, wiring, plumbing, fittings, finishes and compliance with drawings, using ladders, moisture meters, cameras and checklists. Reports with photographs and recommendations follow, often within a day or two. The team includes inspectors, report writers, schedulers and a technical head who reviews difficult cases. Each inspection happens in someone else's property, sometimes under construction, sometimes occupied, so access, safety and manners matter. Buyers read reports closely and challenge anything missed. Inspectors need the confidence to say a house has problems when the seller or builder is standing beside them. For the wider sector, read HR for construction and real estate.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in property inspection companies. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
A buyer finds damp three months after an inspection and blames the report, putting the inspector under scrutiny.
A builder or seller hints that a harsh report will cost the inspector future work, and a weak inspector softens the wording.
Roofs, basements, unfinished stairs and live electrical panels are checked with little backup.
Inspectors spend the day on site and the night writing reports, and photographs get mislabelled.
One inspector is thorough and another skims, so the firm's quality depends on who is sent.
Back-to-back inspections across the city leave inspectors rushing the last visit of the day.
Juniors learn to spot a hairline crack versus a structural one only by shadowing seniors, who have little time.
A buyer expects a structural opinion from a basic inspection, and disputes follow.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Employee Relations. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a property inspection companies business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A checklist per property type, with photograph requirements and severity ratings, kept in documentation.
A checklist per property type, with photograph requirements and severity ratings, kept in documentation.
A written policy that findings are reported as seen, with senior review for disputed cases and no penalty for honest reports.
A written policy that findings are reported as seen, with senior review for disputed cases and no penalty for honest reports. See grievance routes.
Check-in times, no-roof-alone rules and kit for unfinished buildings.
Check-in times, no-roof-alone rules and kit for unfinished buildings. Detail in safety routines.
Limit the number of visits per day and build in reporting time in working hours.
Limit the number of visits per day and build in reporting time in working hours. Track in attendance records.
A shadowing plan with a short sign-off for each skill, from damp to wiring.
A shadowing plan with a short sign-off for each skill, from damp to wiring. See learning steps.
A scope note given to every customer stating what is and is not examined, signed before the visit.
A scope note given to every customer stating what is and is not examined, signed before the visit.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Checklists, scope notes and report standards that make quality independent of who is sent.
Solo-work rules and kit for roofs, basements and live panels.
A shadowing plan that turns juniors into reliable inspectors.
A route to report pressure from clients without fear of losing work.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in construction and real estate, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Site engineers, supervisors, crews and sales teams leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it between projects.
8 min readRead article
A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead article
A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
7 min readRead article
An employee brings you a complaint about their supervisor. What happens next should not depend on who is in the room. A grievance procedure a small company can actually run.
8 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
State in policy that findings are reported honestly, give a senior reviewer for disputes and record any pressure raised. Ask a qualified professional about liability wording.
It depends on size and travel, but reserve time for notes and photographs. Overloaded days produce poor reports.
Use a master checklist, a second review of reports and periodic joint inspections.
Shadowing, annotated sample reports and review of past disputes. A written ladder keeps progress visible.
Give each customer a signed scope note before the visit, and explain what a basic inspection does not cover.
A checklist and review system, a safety routine for solo work, a training ladder and records. Legal matters go to a qualified professional.
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