Preparing for your commercial inspection is similar to preparing your home for a residential inspection. In addition to checking off anything on this list that applies to your commercial property, you should also be prepared to give your tenants a minimum of 24 hours’ notice before your scheduled inspection to ensure that they prepare their space or unit.

Depending on what you’re hoping to learn from your inspection report, you may need to prepare in advance:

• list of specialized instructions
• list of tenants by name
• clearly dated past inspection reports and repair invoices
• invoices and reports for any specialized equipment
• the square footage of the building as well as individual units

When ordering a commercial draw inspection, it’s important to communicate clearly with builders and project managers. Check in the day before the inspection to be sure that any appliances being looked at have arrived and that other aspects of the building process are being completed on schedule. If any aspect of the building is unprepared at the time of the inspection, results will be inconclusive and your inspector will have to disclaim it in their report. You would then need to schedule an additional inspection to receive an accurate report for the lender.