Yes to video, no to video inspections. Every documented video surface in Latchel, from resident uploads to recorded video calls, hangs off a maintenance work order. Latchel Inspections, launched June 2025, is documented around photos and notes only.
Two media lanes, and only one of them carries video
Everything below is drawn from Latchel's own published documentation: help center guides for property managers, residents and service providers, the product release notes archive, and the public partner API specification.
The maintenance work order
Video: fully supportedYou can also add videos to a work order at any time except when the work order is completed/cancelled.
high fidelity video calls with your vendors, your tenants, and staff to see what's really happening inside of a unit, with
No app downloads required for technicians or for tenants.
Create Video Chat Roomfrom the work order, after which
The call recording or video information will be available, and this is automatically tagged or associated with the work order.
such as (.)png, (.)pdf, movie or a gif, and docxcan be saved and previewed, and warns that
Deleting a file is irreversible.
Latchel Inspections
Video: not documentedarea, name, or instructions, and tracking results across the portfolio. Photos are the documented media.
conducting inspections in the field (no login required)and a mobile-friendly interface, which points at inspectors, techs and vendors rather than residents.
Read together, those two columns describe a platform that treats media as evidence about a job. That is the correct design for what Latchel sells. According to Latchel's published product pages (latchel.com), the company positions itself as an AI front office that resolves maintenance before dispatch, reporting that 23 percent of tickets are solved at intake and that its human experts always do a second video call for issues that are emergencies, successfully de-escalating an additional 48% of issues.
Video earns its place in that funnel because a resident pointing a camera at a leaking valve is often the difference between a truck roll and a two-minute fix.
How Latchel Inspections actually shipped, dated from their own release notes
Latchel publishes a release notes archive, which makes the inspection product's history unusually legible. We compiled the inspection entries in order. Nobody else appears to have.
The upcoming feature is framed around move-in readiness and owner asset care, with the media promise stated plainly: Technicians can document each inspection with notes and photos, helping you visualize and address maintenance needs swiftly.
Technicians, notes, photos. That framing never changes.
Move-in, move-out and seasonal lists, customizable templates, records kept in one place. The capability line: Easily track progress, attach photos, and flag follow-up tasks, all from a mobile-friendly interface designed for fieldwork.
The seam between inspection and repair closes. From any inspection, users create work orders that auto-fill with item details, notes, and attachments
, then add budgets, instructions and a vendor in the same flow. This is the moment inspection media starts traveling into the maintenance lane.
Inspection items can be grouped by property areas such as Kitchen, Bedroom 1 and Bathroom 2, plus custom ones like Barn or Backyard, and Inspectors now see grouped items in a mobile-friendly layout with area-specific progress tracking.
A room-by-room structure, which is the shape every condition workflow converges on.
Inspections and Inspection Templates arrive in the Maintenance tab for every property manager customer, described by Latchel as the early version of this feature
with an open request for feedback. The same release shipped the resident video capability, described as residents uploading photos and videos to any open work order
until it is completed or canceled.
That last pairing is the tidiest evidence in the whole audit. On the same day, in the same release, Latchel gave residents video on work orders and gave managers a photo-based inspection product. The two capabilities were built for two different jobs, and the company was explicit about which was which.
Where the media lives, and what its filing labels tell you
The fastest way to understand any platform's media model is to read the vocabulary it uses to file things. Latchel's is consistent from the user interface all the way down to the partner API.
According to Latchel's published help documentation for uploading files to a work order (latchel.com), every attachment is filed under a classification chosen from a fixed list, with two of the seven defined in the guide itself: Before Image is the image of the site before work is done
and After Image is the finished result after work is done
. The same seven values appear verbatim as the enum in Latchel's public partner API specification, which means the labels are not a cosmetic dropdown; they are the platform's actual model of what a file is for.
Six of the seven describe a repair or its paperwork. A walkthrough video of a unit in good condition has exactly one place to land, and that place is Miscellaneous. This is not a shortcoming; it is a maintenance system being honest about its own subject matter.
| Surface | Who captures | Photo | Video | What it attaches to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maintenance intake | Resident | Yes | Yes | The work order |
| Work order update | Resident | Yes | Yes, until completed or canceled | The work order |
| Work order files | Property manager | Yes | Movie files supported | The work order |
| Service provider update | Vendor or in-house tech | Yes, before and after | Same file uploader | The work order |
| Video chat room | Manager with resident | n/a | Recorded and tagged | The work order |
| Latchel Inspections | Inspector or tech in the field | Yes | Not documented | The inspection item |
One more scoping detail worth knowing before you plan around video. According to Latchel's published release notes (latchel.com), when the company opened enhanced intake troubleshooting to non-emergencies, it noted that A follow-up call from our team and video troubleshooting with residents is still reserved for emergency issues only.
Live expert video is a triage instrument aimed at the situations where it saves the most money and the most damage, which is exactly where you would point it.
Getting media out: files, the partner API, webhooks and MCP
If you plan to do anything downstream with Latchel media, four export surfaces matter, and all four are job-shaped.
The Files tab. Per Latchel's help documentation, files on a work order can be previewed in place, downloaded individually, or deleted, with the guide noting that deletion is irreversible. Preview-before-download landed as a June 2025 improvement, so the review loop is quick, but the unit of export is one file at a time on one work order.
The partner API. Latchel publishes a full OpenAPI specification for its Partner API (latchel.com), covering roughly three dozen endpoints across jobs, properties, portfolios, locations, tenants, owners, vendors, payment methods, categories, issues, problems and invoices. Media appears in exactly one place: Job Files.
GET /jobs/{job_id}/files
POST /jobs/{job_id}/files
GET /jobs/{job_id}/files/{file_id}
PUT /jobs/{job_id}/files/{file_id}
Uploads are multipart form data carrying a file plus a required classification. Retrieval returns a temporary download link with an explicit expiration timestamp, so integrations fetch bytes on demand rather than holding a permanent URL. Requests are limited to 600 per API key per ten minutes. There is no inspection endpoint anywhere in the specification.
Webhooks. Latchel's published webhook reference documents three events: job created and updated, portfolio created and updated, and tenant created and updated. There is no file event and no inspection event, so a listener learns that a job changed and then goes and asks the API what is attached to it.
The MCP connector. This is the newest and, for anyone building on Latchel, the most interesting surface. According to Latchel's help documentation, The Latchel MCP connector lets you talk to your Latchel account directly from AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT
, scoped to your company and gated behind your own login via OAuth rather than an API key. The supported scope is work orders, tasks and lookups for properties, residents and company users. Files, photos, video and inspections are not part of it today. Very few property management platforms have shipped an MCP connector at all, and Latchel shipping one says something about where the company thinks the next integration surface is.
The RentCheck seam, and what it says about Latchel's actual position
Latchel also distributes RentCheck, the resident-completed inspection platform, through its resident benefits marketplace, and it is scrupulous about the boundary. Latchel's own page for that offering states: All services and products are provided by RentCheck, not Latchel, and subject to RentCheck's terms and conditions.
The integration is a real one and it runs in the direction you would expect. According to RentCheck's published help documentation (getrentcheck.com), once items are flagged for maintenance on a RentCheck inspection, users select flagged items and choose Create Latchel work order
, confirm the matching Latchel property, and then name the work order and confirm a description that is autofilled with the maintenance flag notes.
What crosses that seam is the finding, not the footage. The documented handoff is text and routing: item notes, occupancy status, access instructions, skill category and vendor assignment. The inspection media stays in the inspection platform, where the report and the side-by-side comparison live, and Latchel receives the thing it is built to act on. For a maintenance front office, that is the right payload. It also means that if you want condition evidence reviewed, you need something on the inspection side of the seam doing the reviewing, because nothing on the maintenance side is looking at pixels.
This is the pattern we found across the whole vertical, documented platform by platform in our audit of which property management software supports video inspections. Capture is everywhere and it is good. Judgment is nowhere. Every tool hands a human a set of photos and asks them to decide what changed, which is the step that scales linearly with door count.
Across long-term rental software, video capture is consistently reserved for the moments a human has already committed to watching: a live troubleshooting call, an emergency, a specific reported defect. Photos get used for the routine, repeatable work. That is not a technical limit, it is an attention budget. Nobody can watch a six-minute walkthrough of every unit, so nobody asks for one. Change who does the watching and the calculus changes with it, which is the argument for video versus photo rental inspections.
Latchel resolves the repair. RapidEye tells you what changed in the unit
RapidEye is AI inspection intelligence, and it sits next to a Latchel-run maintenance operation rather than on top of it. Your tenant or a staff member records a walkthrough on their phone. RapidEye reviews the footage against that unit's own move-in baseline and reports what actually changed: damage separated from normal wear, missing items, new issues versus previously seen ones, each finding carrying its own timestamped evidence. Nobody on your team has to open a submission and scroll photos to find out.
Anything that needs a repair becomes a work order in the front office you already run, and Latchel does what Latchel is excellent at: troubleshoot it, resolve what can be resolved without a truck, dispatch the rest. Two systems, two jobs, no overlap. More on the approach for long-term rental portfolios and on AI damage detection for long-term rentals.
Frequently asked questions
Does Latchel support video inspections? +
Latchel supports video, but on maintenance work orders rather than on inspections. Residents can add video to an open work order at any time until it is completed or canceled, staff can open a recorded video chat room that is tagged to the work order, and movie files are among the file types Latchel stores and previews. Latchel Inspections, the templated checklist product live for all property manager customers since June 2025, is documented around areas, items, notes and photos. Video does not appear in Latchel's inspection documentation.
Can residents upload video to Latchel? +
Yes. Latchel's resident help documentation states that residents can add videos to a work order at any time except when the work order is completed or cancelled. The capability shipped in a June 2025 release described as residents uploading photos and videos to any open work order. It is scoped to an existing maintenance request, not to a scheduled inspection of the unit.
Does Latchel have its own inspection product, or is that RentCheck? +
Both, and they do different jobs. Latchel built a native Inspections feature, announced in March 2025, in beta in April 2025 and live for all property manager customers on June 30, 2025, with customizable templates, items grouped by area, and work orders generated from flagged items. Separately, RentCheck is offered through Latchel's benefits marketplace as the resident-completed inspection platform, and Latchel's own page states that those services are provided by RentCheck, not Latchel.
Does the Latchel Partner API expose inspections or inspection media? +
No. The published partner API is organized around jobs, properties, portfolios, tenants, owners, vendors, categories and invoices. The only media surface is Job Files: list, upload, retrieve and update a file attached to a job, with a classification chosen from Before Image, After Image, Estimate, Invoice, Invoice Receipt, Miscellaneous and Work Order, and a temporary expiring download link. There is no inspection endpoint and no inspection webhook.
What is the best way to add video inspections alongside Latchel? +
Keep Latchel as the maintenance front office and pair a video inspection layer for unit condition. The tenant or a staff member records a walkthrough on their phone, RapidEye reviews the footage against that unit's own move-in baseline and reports what changed, and anything that needs a repair becomes a Latchel work order in the workflow your team already runs.
Sources
Sources are named at the publisher level with their root domain, rather than linked or titled; every figure is verifiable at the named source.
- Latchel product pages, help center documentation for property managers, residents and service providers, product release notes archive, webhook reference and Partner API specification, Latchel, 2025 to 2026 latchel.com
- RentCheck help center documentation on the Latchel work order integration, RentCheck, 2026 getrentcheck.com