Does Propertyware support video inspections?

What the Inspections module actually is

Propertyware is RealPage's single-family-focused property management platform, and its inspection product is a first-party module rather than a bolted-on partner app. According to Propertyware's own product documentation (propertyware.com), inspections run through a dedicated mobile app "available for your iOS or Android mobile device," and the module is filed under Maintenance alongside work orders.

The design intent is stated plainly on the product page: speed. Propertyware describes a "proprietary camera mode" that "allows you to 'snap, tag and go', cutting inspection time by 50%." Everything about the capture flow follows from that goal. An inspector walks a checklist, taps items, snaps photos against the items, and moves on. The video walkthrough of the app on Propertyware's own site (propertyware.com) puts the same idea in an operator's language: "Use the phone's camera to document items as you complete your customized checklist, and attach any photos or notes."

Read those three lines together and the media model is fully specified without a spec sheet. Photos are unbounded in count, deliberately compressible in quality, and expected to sync opportunistically over wifi because field staff work on cellular in houses scattered across a metro. According to Propertyware's published mobile app documentation (propertyware.com), the app's inspection capabilities are listed as: create or schedule an inspection, view scheduled inspections, view maps to properties, work through detailed inspection checklists, capture and upload photos, use standard or custom inspection templates, work offline, maintenance categories by room, and create work orders directly from inspections. That list is the complete published inventory, and video is not on it.

This is a scattered-single-family product making a defensible bet. In a portfolio of detached homes, the constraint is drive time and bandwidth, not fidelity. A small, taggable, wifi-syncing photo is the media type that survives that constraint, and Propertyware optimized for it years before anyone in this category was shipping video.

Where each kind of media is allowed to travel

The most useful finding of this audit is not that video is missing. It is that video exists in Propertyware and is routed somewhere specific. Propertyware runs two separate media lanes, and knowing which is which tells you exactly how to work with the platform.

The video lane is documented in Propertyware's tenant portal material (propertyware.com), which describes the workflow directly: "Now, when your tenants submit a service request, they can upload a photo or short video. This is helpful when there are multiple rooms in a home, so that your service technician can locate the specific issue more quickly and easily." Note the word "short." That is the tell, and it is the same tell across this category. Video is rationed wherever a human has to watch it, and generous nowhere, because attention is the scarce resource, not storage. We found the identical pattern auditing every other platform in the full property management software video audit: tenant-facing video is capped, staff-facing video is rare, and no platform in the category reviews the footage for you.

The practical read for a Propertyware operator: the platform already proves your tenants will shoot video on a phone and send it to you. They do it every time something breaks. What Propertyware routes that footage toward is a dispatch decision, not a condition baseline. If you want the same tenant, holding the same phone, to produce a move-in or move-out record, that walkthrough has to land somewhere that treats it as evidence. That is a layer question, not a Propertyware limitation.

Who actually performs the inspection

Both models are supported, and this surprises people who assume a legacy platform is staff-only. Propertyware documents the staff model first, describing inspection teams "of any size" with centralized scheduling and security, and its API carries an inspector ID on every inspection record. But tenant capture is documented too, and in two places. The product page says you can "send new tenants a link to complete an online move-in report from their desktop at their convenience," and the app overview page goes further: "The app is great for move-ins too. Just send the link to your new tenants so they can complete their move-in evaluation on their phones!"

So Propertyware supports tenant-guided inspections, scoped to move-in, delivered by link, with photos as the medium. Everything published about recurring and move-out inspections points back at staff running the app. That is a sensible place to draw the line if a person has to read every submission, and it is exactly where the ceiling sits for the whole category.

What the API hands you, field by field

Product pages describe intent. An API specification describes what the database actually holds, which is why we read it. Propertyware publishes a live REST specification for its Open API, and we walked the inspection surface of it in full.

According to Propertyware's published Open API specification (propertyware.com), the API spans more than 100 documented endpoint paths across accounting, leases, buildings, units, contacts, prospects, vendors, work orders, documents and inspections. Keys are self-generated by the customer from Administration Setup, which makes this one of the more accessible integration rails in long-term rentals. Inspections occupy exactly two of those paths, and both are read-only.

This is a genuinely useful thing to know before you scope an integration, and it is not a flaw. It is a clean separation of concerns: the inspection is a structured judgment record, and the evidence behind it is a document. If you are building anything that needs both, plan on two calls, filtering documents by entity type and entity ID rather than expecting media inline on the inspection.

The read-only shape holds up against the live service, not just the document. Calling the inspections path on Propertyware's production API host returns the platform's standard "valid x-propertyware-system-id, x-propertyware-client-id, x-propertyware-client-secret headers are required" response, confirming the resource is there and waiting for a key. A write attempt against the same path answers 405 Method Not Allowed, while the identical attempt against work orders, leases and contacts answers 415 Unsupported Media Type, the response a resource gives when the verb is accepted and only the content type is missing. Inspections are a record you read; work orders are a record you create. That asymmetry is the integration design, stated in HTTP.

Propertyware also tells you, on its own Open API page, what customers already do with this rail. Two named customers describe using the Propertyware API to connect inspection tools: one operator cites connecting to Property Meld for inspections, another cites Property Meld and zInspector together, calling the process "smooth and seamless." Propertyware built the API precisely so operators could extend it this way, and its marketing celebrates them for doing it. Extending inspections through the API is the sanctioned path, not a workaround.

A stable module, and what that means for your roadmap

One more piece of context worth having. According to RealPage's own product announcement (realpage.com), Propertyware Inspections launched for the desktop and iOS platforms in March 2013, built to automate "the inspection workflow process for rental housing clients." Apple's App Store metadata (apple.com) then dates the current published version of that inspections app to September 2022, the companion Propertyware Mobile app to August 2023, and the Propertyware Maintenance app to November 2024. This is a mature module with a settled feature set rather than one under active reinvention.

The companion app's own listing reinforces the pattern one more time. According to the Propertyware Mobile listing on the App Store (apple.com), the field contributions it supports are to "capture and attach photos to your buildings, units and maintenance items" and to create notes "with voice-to-text capture." Photos and text, across every app in the suite.

Read that as planning information rather than as criticism. A stable core is exactly why Propertyware operators run large single-family portfolios on it without drama, and the Open API is the surface the platform intends you to build new capability on. If video walkthroughs and automated review are on your roadmap for the next twelve months, the realistic shape is Propertyware as the system of record plus a capture-and-review layer next to it, joined at the API. That is the same architecture the photo-versus-video tradeoff pushes every growing operator toward once door count outruns the review calendar.

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