Photograph Every Walkthrough and Date It
Inspection's handled: get it, pay for it, read it. Now a smaller thing people skip because it feels too obvious to bother with. Take pictures. Every walkthrough, every time. And date them.
Here's the payoff. You'll walk through three, four, maybe six houses in a few weeks, and by house number four the water stain in the basement of house number two has quietly relocated in your memory to house number three, the house with the good light in the kitchen might have been the one with the cracked driveway, and you won't know it until you're at the table trying to decide and your notes are just impressions. Your brain compresses, blends, and loses the details you need most. A timestamped photo doesn't.
Think of it the way you'd think of a recipe card. Six months later you can't remember whether the braise that turned out well had the vinegar in it, but the photo plus the date tells you which card to trust. Same principle on a house. Your brain is not a filing cabinet.
What to actually photograph
Do this on the first walkthrough, not the third, once you've already learned the hard way you should have.
- Every room, all four walls, standing in the same spot each time. Don't just get the pretty angle. Get the corner where the paint's a slightly different color, because that's patch work, and patch work is a question.
- Water stains, ceiling and floor. Any discoloration. Any sag. You will not remember which bedroom had it.
- Under sinks, with the cabinet doors open. This is where slow leaks live and hide.
- The water heater and furnace, including the little manufacture date sticker. Zoom in and get the sticker readable. This tells you how old the thing actually is regardless of what the listing says.
- The exterior, all four sides, and the roofline from the street. Missing shingles, sagging gutters, that kind of thing.
- Anything the agent says out loud that isn't in the listing. "Oh, the sprinkler system's original to the house" — take a picture of the sprinkler control box right then, while you're thinking about it, so the comment has an anchor.
Then, before you forget, rename the folder with the address and the date. Not "House 3." The address. You'll thank yourself later comparing four houses and trying to remember which one had good bones and which one just had good staging.
Why the date part matters
This is the part people skip and the part that matters most if you end up negotiating. Photograph a crack in the foundation on your first walkthrough, dated, the seller's disclosure says nothing about it, and your inspector flags it two weeks later — now you have a timeline. You have proof the condition existed before your offer, which matters when you're negotiating a repair credit or figuring out whether something got worse between your walkthrough and your inspection. Without the date it's your word against a memory. With it, it's documentation. I've watched this decide a negotiation — not as a technicality, but as the difference between the seller taking a repair request seriously and acting like you're inventing problems.
A caution, since you're in other people's houses
Be respectful about what you're photographing. You're documenting the house and its systems, not the family's belongings. Don't photograph personal items, don't go through closets and drawers looking for something interesting, and if kids or a dog are home, keep them out of frame. Most agents are used to buyers taking pictures and won't blink. If a seller's present and seems uneasy, just say plainly that you're documenting condition for your own records — a completely normal thing to say that usually settles it.
One warning from experience: the instinct to plan ahead of the information is strong. I've caught myself running numbers on what a kid could someday afford before anyone asked me to, and stopped, because that's not the decision on the table. Photographs keep you deciding on the actual house instead of the house your memory invented a week later.
Before next time: if you've already walked through a house or two, go back through your camera roll tonight and see how much you can actually reconstruct from what's there. If it's thin, that's your answer — start over on the next one and do it right.