Life-safety inspections: the walk takes an hour and the report is what protects you

Ask a maintenance supervisor when the smoke alarms were last checked and you will usually get a confident answer. Ask for the record and the confidence drops.

That gap is the entire problem with life-safety inspections. The work gets done at most properties. The evidence that it got done frequently does not exist in a form anyone else can read, which means the work protects the residents and does not protect the owner.

An undocumented inspection is legally indistinguishable from one that never happened

This is the sentence worth sitting with, because it reorders the priorities.

After a fire, the questions are when the alarm in that unit was last verified, who verified it, what they found, and what was done about it. Those questions are answered from a record or they are not answered.

A supervisor testifying that alarms are checked annually as a matter of practice is a description of an intention. A dated report listing 214 units, each with a result, each with an initial, is evidence. The difference in outcome between those two is measured in policy limits.

Five items, and the batteries are the least of them

Smoke alarms in every unit. Tested, not looked at. A tested alarm means the button was pressed and the horn sounded. Record the date, the result, and whether the unit was accessed at all, because the no-access units are the ones that matter most.

Carbon monoxide alarms wherever you have gas appliances, attached garages, or fuel-fired equipment. Requirements vary by state and this is one where the local code genuinely differs, so confirm yours.

Emergency and exit lighting. The monthly test is a 30-second button press per fixture. The annual test is a 90-minute discharge, which is the one that actually finds dead batteries and the one nobody does. A fixture that lights for four seconds and dies passes the monthly test and fails the emergency.

Fire extinguishers. Monthly visual check for pressure, seal, and accessibility. Annual professional service with a tag. The tag is the document, and an extinguisher with an expired tag in a common area is one of the most reliably cited items there is.

Egress paths, doors, and stairwells. Blocked, propped, or nonfunctional. This is a walking inspection with no equipment and it finds more real hazards per minute than anything else on the list.

The report has to be per-unit, not per-property

A summary line reading "annual smoke alarm inspection completed, 4/12/2026" is a claim about 214 units backed by one entry.

What holds up is a unit-level record: unit number, date, result, technician, and any corrective action. It is longer, it is boring, and it is the only version that answers the question an adjuster will actually ask, which is about one specific unit.

That is why light and alarm inspection reports at scale run multiple pages. GetDone produces multi-page inspection reports for exactly this reason, gated so the workflow cannot close with units unaccounted for and requiring supervisor approval before it closes.

Where the boundary is: we do not encode your jurisdiction's inspection frequencies or code requirements. The workflow enforces that the inspection happened, was documented per unit, and was reviewed. Determining what your state and county require is yours, and any vendor claiming to track life-safety code across every market you operate in should be asked to demonstrate it for your specific county.

Corrective action is the field most often left empty

An inspection that finds nothing is suspicious. On 214 units you will find dead alarms, missing alarms, alarms painted over, and at least one that a resident removed.

Each of those needs a linked repair with its own completion date, because the finding is only half the record. An inspection log showing eleven failed alarms and no corresponding repairs is worse evidence than no log, since it documents that you knew.

Generating work orders directly from inspection findings is the mechanism that keeps that pairing intact. When the finding and the fix live in separate systems, the fix is the one that goes missing.

Sequence it against your turn schedule

The practical objection to unit-level inspections is access, and the practical answer is that you already enter every vacant unit.

Fold the alarm and CO check into the make-ready checklist as a gated item and a meaningful share of your units get inspected annually with no additional entry. Then the standalone annual walk only has to cover units that did not turn, which is a smaller list and an easier scheduling problem.

Ask for one report

Request the last life-safety inspection report from your largest property.

If what comes back is a one-line completion note rather than a unit-level list with no-accesses and corrective actions, you have the finding, and it is the same one at every other property.

How many units were listed?