PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Hey, there IT crowd. Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. So today we’re going to jump back into some of our report optimization stuff that we’ve been talking about this year. It’s been going great, getting lots of positive feedback, lots of recommendations from experienced home inspectors, and just wanted to continue this series, because it’s been really good. And it’s something that’s close to my heart. I mean, Inspector Toolbelt is, in of itself, home inspection software. This podcast is based on that. And we want to write great reports, and we want to optimize our time.

So today we’re going to talk about a way that we can optimize our time. And you notice, I’ll say, optimize our time, or be more efficient, and not use the word fast. I hate that word fast. I don’t want to inspect fast. I want to inspect thoroughly but efficiently. So a lot of new home inspectors will say, how do I get faster? Well, we’re going to talk about that today with this and using hand signals instead of annotations. Now that doesn’t mean that we never use annotations. That’s not what I’m saying. What this means, though, is that we opt for our default being hand signals. And I stole this from another inspector years ago. I saw one of the reports. I’m like, oh, these hand signals made a lot of sense. And you know, a lot of big inspection companies do that, if you look at a lot of sample reports, and when I say hand signals, I’m not talking about sign language. But if there’s a defect on the chimney, you’ll see a picture of the chimney and their hand pointing to it. Or, you know, if you’re like AJ, you had that little white extendable hand thing that he carries around. However we do it, it’s very effective. But now we may be very attached to our annotations, and they do have their place. So you’ll find annotations in almost every single one of my reports, but you’ll find them on about maybe a half a dozen or dozen pictures at most, sometimes maybe just one picture. If it’s a really clean house, I might struggle to find one picture to put an annotation on. There’s several reasons why.

But first of all, let’s talk about the math of an annotation. So I did the math for you, went and I actually timed how long on average it took me to add an annotation to a picture. So if you use Inspector Toolbelt, we have an auto annotation feature. It doesn’t automatically annotate the photo, but it’ll open the photo in the annotation panel so you can annotate it, click done, and off you go. Sometimes you’re just going in, clicking on the photos, depends on which software you’re using. On average, to add two annotations to a photo took me about 11 seconds from the time that the photo appeared, I’d click on the photo, find what I wanted to point at. And this was just very quick. It actually takes longer if you want to add more annotations or get a little bit more creative with it. This is just adding straight up arrows, two of them. And the reason I took that was, well, first of all, that’s an average number of annotations that we see typically, you know, anecdotally speaking, on a photo, sometimes one, sometimes I’ve seen where you can barely see the photo, and there’s, like, you know, 12 annotations on that photo of pointing to different things.

But this actually came up because a user contacted us one day, and he had almost 300 photos in his report, and he annotated every single one of them, multiple annotations, captions on every photo. And I actually had to stop and think if I were a consumer, if I were his client, would I be cool with this? I found it, to be perfectly frank, distracting, because here we are. I want to know what the big things are, and I’m looking through all these photos with annotations, and it made everything look big and scary, to be frank, but it was just complicated. Like dishwasher works, send me a picture of the dishwasher if you want or don’t. I just need to know if it works. Instead, he has pictures and diagrams and says, you know, here’s the front of the dishwasher, here’s the side of the dishwasher. Okay, if that’s what you want to do, cool, if that’s your stick and your clients like that, but here’s the reality of it. On average, and again, this is anecdotally speaking, with the reports that we have that come through our software and things like that. On average, most home inspectors have about 150 photos per inspection, some way more, some way less, but on average, about 150 photos. So if you count 11 seconds for two annotations per photo, if you were to annotate all 150 photos, that would take you 27.5 minutes every inspection, an extra 27 minutes to add annotations to a photo. Well, let’s say you’re like, well, I’m not unreasonable, I only do about a third of mine. That would take you an extra 9.1 minutes, approximately. I took off the extra decimals at the end, or not the extra numbers on the decimal after the decimal. Sorry. I apparently don’t know where decimals go.

Let’s say we’re like, well, no, I’m very well within reason, Ian says he does a half a dozen or a dozen. I only do 20. That equals an extra 3.67 minutes per inspection. So now we may say, well, isn’t that worth it? Well, let’s do some math. Going back to the 150 photos, if we annotated all of those and we did an average of 200 inspections a year, that would take us an extra 91.67 hours a year. Let me repeat that, 91.67 hours per year. We spend over two weeks just annotating all those photos throughout the year that, to be perfectly frank, probably irritate more than help if we’re doing that many that that is. If we did 50 photos per report that we annotate, that’s an average of 30.33 hours per year, almost a full week’s worth of work. You could take off and go to Orlando with the kids with that amount of time. And even if we did 20 photos a year, that’s 12.23 hours a year. That’s a full day and a half. That equals, if we’re charging $500 per inspection, that equals three full inspections, that’s 1500 bucks. And if you’re doing ancillaries, you know, there’s companies out there, like we’ve had some on here, and we’ve talked about our pricing, you know, that’s, that’s up to $3,000 and just annotating 20 photos a year. And then, if we’re looking at, you know, the 150, let’s do that math again, 150 photos annotated on each inspection, on average, 91 hours a year of just annotating. I mean, if we’re doing two inspections a day, and let’s go to the low number. Low number being 500. Two inspections a day, five days a week, that’s $10,000 over the course of two weeks, plus the extra 10 hours, which is, let’s say, another 1000, that’s $11,000 a year annotating photos on the low end. If you’re on the high end, that’s a little over 20,000 actually.

So all that math just says we spend a lot of time annotating photos when 90% of the photos probably didn’t need to get annotated. Now I might get some pushback, like, well, my client doesn’t know what the left side of the dishwasher looks like. Oh, okay, cool. That’s fine. If I have a picky client, and they’re just like, can you show me where all the nails are in the attic? Yeah, I’m gonna give them an arrow and show them where the nail is. But most people aren’t like that. Most of the time we don’t even need to put in the picture of a dishwasher if it’s fine. That’s a whole different subject of how many pictures should we put in versus how many pictures the client actually wants. But we’ll save that for another time. But just going by these numbers, how much extra time does it take to add a hand signal like, okay, we’re pointing at the front steps, and we want to let them know that the left hand rail is loose, and we put our finger in the shot and we point to that handrail. If you took a cumulative number of shots, even without doing this on a regular basis, it would maybe take an extra minute per inspection, cumulatively over the course of, you know, 30 to 50 pictures, it’s almost immeasurable. And then once you’re good at it, you don’t even think and you just put in the hand signals. Preston Kincaid, I did a podcast episode with him on his podcast, and we talked about hand signals. And he actually has a whole thing on this, and it makes a lot of sense. It’s natural for a person to think, okay, when we talk, we gesture, and we actually watch people’s hands, and it adds to an element to the story, or whatever they’re telling. He did a couple of shots where he showed steps where the risers were too big. So he took a picture of his fingers close together, like this riser is too short and this one’s too wide. And he pulled his fingers apart and took another shot. I tell you what, that one shot without showing us the narrative, everybody sitting on that webinar knew exactly what was the issue after that. It’s amazing how good you can get with hand signals or just pointing.

Try it out, see if it helps you, because these are big hours, and we may say, well, my schedule is not full, so I don’t need…optimize now, when your schedule is not full, when things may be not going really great. Maybe we only have three inspections, so I can spend an extra 12 hours, you know, adding annotations, you might find that your clients actually like it. And I’ve had agents comment on it, they’re like, yeah, we knew exactly where it was because Ian was pointing to it. And it adds a human element to our reports, which, in an age when AI and there’s a lack of human element in a lot of things. Sometimes people appreciate that more. Now, does that mean, again, that we don’t add any annotations to our photos? No, of course not. Sometimes I’ll put a picture of a roof on there, and I just have one big photo saying multiple locations of shingle damage. And I’ll just put, you know, eight, nine, 10, arrows on there, just to make the point. Like, all right, you guys can fight this, but here’s a lot of little bits of damage. They need to be on there. Now we may not be as extreme as having 300 annotated photos in our report, and if we do, you know, and that’s what we want to do, that’s fine, but think about the math a little bit. So for those of us who have 300 annotated photos in a report, let’s double that 150 number. That’s a full month. That is 182 hours of work, a full month, over a month of just annotating photos. How much money can we make in a month by just using hand signals, do the same thing, provide the same level of report, and possibly even a better report by increasing our hand signals or taking better pictures. And that’s the point I wanted to end on.

Sometimes our pictures stink. It may be worth it sometime to do just a little quick, couple hour photography course, and I know for me, that has helped doing research on photography, because it talks about subject matter. Like people get upset at a photo and they’re like, I don’t know what the issue is here. It’s because we didn’t put the subject in the right frame. And you’ll take two hours. Ask ChatGPT, say, tell me how to take a better photo. Here’s a photo. Make suggestions on how I could have made this more apparent. Once it becomes second nature, people are like, great photos, awesome. Like that loose handrail, if you angle your camera just right, the handrail that’s loose is already in the shot, and they’re like, oh, it must be the left handrail. That’s a little bit more advanced. You don’t have to do it. But I tell you, that little extra effort helped me to have way better photos in my report, and then I could focus on, instead of standing there adding annotations to everything, I could focus on the inspection, my client asking questions, did I miss anything over here? Let me walk around the house one more time. I was able to deliver a better product. My clients are thrilled with our reports, and I didn’t waste my time annotating all these different photos.

So if you agree, disagree, let me know. We’d love to hear from you. But this is what I have found that has worked for me. So thank you very much, and we look forward to talking to you all again on the next episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

PODCAST SUMMARY/BLOG

In the world of home inspection, efficiency is everything. As professionals, we’re constantly seeking ways to deliver thorough, high-quality reports while optimizing our workflow. One surprising area where many inspectors unknowingly waste significant time is in photo annotation – the process of adding digital arrows, circles, and text to inspection photos to highlight defects or points of interest. The latest episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk dives deep into this overlooked aspect of report creation, revealing startling statistics about the time investment required for photo annotations.

When we analyzed the time cost of photo annotations, the numbers were eye-opening. Adding just two annotations to a single photo takes approximately 11 seconds. While that might seem negligible, let’s extrapolate: with an average of 150 photos per inspection, annotating every photo would consume 27.5 minutes per inspection. For an inspector performing 200 inspections annually, that translates to an astonishing 91.67 hours per year – more than two full work weeks – spent merely adding digital markings to photos. Even annotating just 20 photos per report still adds up to 12.23 hours annually, equivalent to more than a full workday.

The financial impact is equally significant. Those 91+ hours represent approximately $11,000 in potential revenue for inspectors charging $500 per inspection. That’s substantial income sacrificed for a practice that may not significantly enhance report quality or client understanding. Instead of elaborate digital annotations, we propose a simpler, more time-efficient alternative: hand signals. By simply pointing to defects in photos using your finger or a pointer tool, you can achieve the same clarity while drastically reducing report production time. This human element often resonates better with clients, creating a more personal connection while conveying information just as effectively, if not more so.

It’s worth noting that we’re not advocating for eliminating annotations entirely. Certain situations warrant digital markers – particularly complex issues requiring multiple indicators on a single photo or instances where precision is paramount. The key is being strategic and selective about when to use annotations versus when a simple hand signal would suffice. By reserving annotations for the roughly 10% of photos that truly benefit from them, inspectors can reclaim dozens of hours annually while maintaining or even improving report quality.

Beyond the annotation-versus-hand-signal debate lies another important consideration: photo quality itself. Often, a well-composed photograph can eliminate the need for any additional markers. Taking time to improve photography skills – understanding proper framing, lighting, and subject focus – can further reduce the need for annotations while enhancing report clarity. By capturing images that naturally draw attention to defects or important features, inspectors can streamline their reporting process even further while delivering more intuitive documentation for clients.