Updated November 2026. First published May 2023.
Every deposit dispute I have ever been part of came down to one question: what did the place look like on day one? Not what the tenant remembers, not what the owner remembers. What the pictures show. So a few years ago we stopped doing the move-in inspection ourselves and handed it to the tenant.
I'll admit that sounded backwards to me the first time someone suggested it. Why would I let the person whose deposit is on the line write the record that protects it? Because they're the one with the motive to be thorough. Nobody looks harder for a scratch on the counter than the person who doesn't want to pay for it later.
How it works
In the first few days of the lease the tenant walks the home with an app on their phone. Every photo is timestamped and geo-tagged, and it goes straight into their file. They can take as many as they want, and I tell them to. Open the drawers, photograph the inside of the oven, get the closet shelves. If it's ugly, document it, because that's exactly what keeps it from being your problem a year from now.
Why not do it ourselves?
We used to. The problem is that an inspection done by our staff is our word against the tenant's the moment there's a disagreement, and a tenant who didn't take the photos has no reason to trust them. When the tenant takes them, nobody can argue about who was holding the camera.
The other reason is honest: our team has a lot of homes to turn and a move-in is a busy day. A tenant with a weekend and a phone will do a more careful job than a coordinator with six keys on the ring.
Move-out is different
Here's a conviction of mine, and some property managers will disagree. The move-out walkthrough is the moment a property manager is most likely to be attacked, verbally or otherwise, because it's the moment the tenant finds out their deposit might be at risk. Colorado gives tenants the right to a walkthrough, and I'm not against the right. I just don't think standing in an empty living room arguing about carpet is a good way to avoid a dispute. Good move-in photos are.
So our move-out walkthroughs are video only, scheduled in advance. The tenant is in the unit with their phone, our staff is at a computer, and the whole thing is recorded. Everybody is calm, everybody has the same footage, and the comparison is the move-in photos against the move-out video, not two memories against each other.
When we get it wrong
We do get it wrong. There's a security deposit dispute form on our website for exactly that. Send the photos, send the evidence, and the team reviews it. Most disputes that come through it turn out to be our own human error, and we fix them without anyone needing a lawyer. I'd rather say that out loud than pretend our ledger is perfect.
If you own a rental and you're still doing move-in inspections on a clipboard, change that this year. If you're a tenant moving into one of our homes, take more photos than you think you need. And if you have a deposit question right now, the dispute form is in the Tenant Center under Moving out, or call 719.581.RENT.
A note on AI. The thoughts, experience, and opinions here are mine. This is not AI content. It's not written by AI. I didn't just give it a prompt and out popped this blogpost. This is real. However, I do use AI as a writing and editing tool to help shape and polish the final text, and to check facts and figures before publishing. If it feels too polished to be really written by Chuck, or a detector flags this post, that's why. AI is a tool, and I used it to help with the words, spelling, and grammar, not the thinking.