A Completely Free App to Speed Up Inventories

To anyone outside the lettings industry, taking inventory may seem an easy job. It’s just a case of just getting a clipboard and walking from one room to the next making a note of things as you go. That’s it, isn’t it?

Well, of course, as an insider you will know that it isn’t as simple as that. We wish! There is a lot more to taking inventory and taking it accurately than meets the eye. A whole section of industy exists in the form of inventory companies who take their instructions form mainly letting agents but now increasingly from landlords directly too.

Quite a number of letting agents prefer to outsource their inventory because of the amount of time it can take doing it in-house. When you are managing 300 or 400 properties, doing inventory is a full-time job for someone, so outsourcing it may be the best option. Many inventory clerks are members of a professional body such as the Association of Independent Inventory Clerks or ARLA Propertymark Inventories both of which run training courses and offer a qualification/accreditation route. In addition, both organisations need members to carry indemnity insurance so letting agents can handover work with peace of mind.

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Will the Tenant Fees Act Result in Inventories Being Taken Back In-House?

Back in the day, there were no such things as inventory companies, and letting agents had to undertake inventory on their own. This meant employing an inventory clerk, or clerks, and supplying them with a clipboard, paper, biros, and a camera. The inventory clerk may also have had other duties to attend to and, bearing in mind that you had to send rolls of film off to have the photos produced, completing a full inventory could take from several days to a couple of weeks.

Then along came inventory companies who did nothing else but carry out inventory, so letting agents who used their services didn’t need to employ their own inventory clerks. However, the introduction of the Tenant Fees Act 2019 may well encourage some agents to take inventory back in-house, and it has been suggested that this may result in inventories not being as accurate as those done by an independent company.

However, writing in The Negotiator magazine (https://flickread.com/edition/html/free/5cc80db634c3f#45) , Frances Burkinshaw says that she started her business in the 1970s when there were no inventory companies and she employed her own inventory clerks and trained them thoroughly. She said that times changed, and she invested in technology, doubtless using a free inventory clerk app such as the Reports2Go app, but that she would never be persuaded that an outside company would do a better job.

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