Yes, through the zInspector integration rather than a native module. The zInspector app captures photos, video and spoken notes; what syncs back into Rentec Direct is the finished PDF report. Video can also be stored as a file, up to 32 MB each.
Rentec Direct is the record, not the camera
This is the single fact that makes every other answer on this page follow, and Rentec Direct states it plainly. On its integrated features page, zInspector appears under Leasing and Inspections as Mobile Rental Inspections, in the same list as Blue Moon for lease forms, Dropbox Sign for electronic signatures and CloudConvert for file conversion. According to Rentec Direct's published integrated features documentation (rentecdirect.com), inspections are a capability provided through a named partner rather than one built in house, and the partnership is long-standing: Rentec Direct's own blog dates the zInspector connection to 2017.
Search the Rentec Direct knowledge base for inspections and every article describes the same workflow. There is no native inspection builder, no native template library and no native inspection app. What exists instead is a thoroughly documented integration, covering account setup, conducting an inspection, tenant invitations, report handling and work-order creation. That is a deliberate architecture, and it is consistent with how Rentec Direct describes itself: founded in 2007 in Grants Pass, Oregon, the third-largest software provider in its sector, built around accounting, rent collection, screening and portals. Its April 2026 Open API announcement puts the user base at over 16,000 landlords and property managers, and its Open API product page counts more than 600,000 units under management.
Three stops, and knowing which one you are on
Inspection media in a Rentec Direct stack passes through three distinct places. Knowing which stop you are standing on tells you exactly what exists and where it lives.
The zInspector app
All media is created here, on a phone or tablet. Six templates ship: Move In, Move Out, Pet Inspection, Pre Move Out Walk Thru, Property/Unit Walkthrough and Violation. Each feature is rated S satisfactory, N new, D damaged, or ! needs attention, and the whole inspection can be completed with no internet connection.
One API key
The operator generates the key themselves: Settings, then Utilities under Tools, then API Keys, then +Add API Key with zInspector selected from the Application dropdown. It gets pasted into zInspector's Accounting Integration screen and enabled. Properties and tenants then flow down automatically, so nobody retypes an address.
Rentec Direct
On submit the report is emailed to the inspector, flagged under Quick Access on the Summary page and on the property's Inspections tab, and saved to the File Library. From there: download the PDF, edit the report, share it into the tenant or owner portal, or click +Add a Work Order to dispatch a finding.
According to Rentec Direct's zInspector setup documentation (rentecdirect.com), the key at stop two is permissioned rather than open: only the account Administrator, managers and users with Full permission can activate API keys by default, with individual permissions grantable on top. And the handoff at stop three is two-way by design. Right-clicking a finished report offers zInspector View and zInspector Edit, which take the reader back into the capture system when they want the underlying media rather than the summary of it.
What the manual actually says about video
Video exists in this stack, and Rentec Direct documents it specifically rather than in passing. The nuance worth understanding before planning a workflow around it is that video is a capture-layer object while the Rentec Direct record is a report-layer object. Four passages from Rentec Direct's own pages establish the entire picture.
The app serves as a powerful property documentation tool, enabling you to take photos, videos, and detailed notes.
Video is a first-class capture option, named alongside photos and notes rather than buried. The same article confirms that all images are automatically tagged with creator, date, property, activity and area, and that reports generate as PDFs from your inspection data and photos.
Creating a video may be more helpful for documenting issues like: Recording noisy appliances, Recording leaky faucets or pipes, Recording a large area.
The guidance is precise about where video earns its keep: conditions a still frame cannot carry. A humming compressor and a dripping trap are time-based evidence. The same article notes that photos and videos both accept Smart Comments, a list of common comments to select from, and that an inspector can narrate while capturing, with talk converted to text and translated.
Capture high-quality 360° photos and videos with any smartphone or tablet. Images are automatically tagged and attached to inspection reports that are available instantly in Rentec Direct.
Read the two sentences as written. Photos and video are both captured; it is images that are tagged and attached to the report. That is the distinction that governs everything downstream, and it is exactly what you would expect from a PDF deliverable.
Rentec Direct file libraries offer unlimited storage capacity... These include jpg, png, gif, txt, pdf, doc, and docx, along with zip, xls, wav, mp3, and mp4, as well as wmv, m4, mpg... mov, csv, psd, xml, jar, 7z, and rar.
Four video containers are explicitly accepted, alongside wav and mp3 for audio. So a clip can absolutely live inside the Rentec Direct record. It gets there as a file uploaded to the relevant library rather than as an object embedded in the inspection report.
The 32 MB figure is the practical governor on any video plan, and Rentec Direct is unusually candid about it. According to Rentec Direct's File Library documentation, "While your Rentec Direct software allows files up to 32 MB, your computer, browser, or internet connection might limit you to about 25 MB." That ceiling fits the short targeted clip the inspection guidance recommends, and it is a straightforward reason the File Library is not where a full room-by-room walkthrough was meant to live. Both facts are consistent with each other and with the product's intent: this is a document system of record, sized for documents, with unlimited room for as many of them as you generate.
| Media type | Captured | Lands in Rentec Direct | Documented detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inspection photos | Yes | Inside the PDF report | Auto-tagged with creator, date, property, activity, area; date-stamped, markup with colored indicators, circles and arrows |
| Inspection video | Yes | By file upload | mp4, mov, wmv, mpg accepted in the File Library; 32 MB per file, unlimited total storage |
| 360 photos | Yes | Via the capture system | Smartphone or tablet per Rentec Direct; zInspector adds virtual tours with a compatible 360 camera |
| Spoken notes | Yes | As report comments | Talk-to-text and translation while capturing photos or video |
| Tenant maintenance media | Photos only | On the work order | Native tenant portal uploads images to work orders, not video |
Staff, vendor or tenant: all three are supported
This is where the Rentec Direct inspection stack is more capable than a lot of small and mid-market property management software, and it deserves saying plainly. According to Rentec Direct's inspection documentation, "Inspections can be processed by you, authorized representatives, and/or your tenants," and an operator can invite individual tenants, selected tenants, or all tenants to complete inspections. The signature step is written to accommodate every one of them: "The inspector is simply the person who conducted the inspection, whether it's yourself, a team member, a vendor, or the tenant."
Invitations carry scheduling with them. Rentec Direct documents automatic reminders to tenants and a Scheduled status shown on the tenant's page when an invitation date is set in the future, and its February 2026 feature spotlight adds that multiple people can perform a single inspection simultaneously, which matters on larger buildings. Remote invitation plus reminders plus a signature block that accepts a tenant as the inspector is a working tenant-guided inspection flow inside an SMB platform. On the capture side, zInspector also offers a dedicated tenant app for move-ins and periodic checks, per its product site (zinspector.com).
Rentec Direct's native tenant channel is deliberately narrower and worth distinguishing, because operators sometimes expect it to do the condition job. With the Repairs tab enabled in the tenant portal, Rentec Direct's tenant portal documentation says tenants can "Report Issues (which creates Work Orders)," "View status and shared activity on work orders" and "Upload images to work orders." The Resident Connect mobile app describes the same flow: renters report an issue, write a description of the concern, and upload a few photos. Photos, not video, and scoped to maintenance rather than condition documentation. That is a maintenance intake channel doing its job well. The condition-documentation job belongs to the integration.
The v3 Open API, and the endpoint that matters here
Rentec Direct launched a public REST API in April 2026, and it changes what is buildable around this platform. According to Rentec Direct's published API v3 specification (rentecdirect.com), keys are generated from the same Settings, Utilities, API Keys screen used for the inspection integration, carry granular scopes such as read:properties and write:work_orders, authenticate with an X-API-Key header, and are rate limited to 60 requests per minute per user. Access is included with every Pro and PM account at no additional cost, and Rentec Direct explicitly names third-party software vendors as an intended audience, adding on its Open API page that if an integration needs a capability not yet included, endpoints can be added on request.
We read the published specification end to end. Its resources group as follows.
The absence of an inspections resource is expected rather than surprising: inspections are not a native Rentec Direct object, so there is nothing for the API to expose. The two highlighted resources are the ones that matter for condition media, and together they are arguably more useful than an inspections endpoint would have been.
| Call | What the spec says it does | Why it matters for condition media |
|---|---|---|
POST /files | Uploads a file as multipart form-data, with optional property_id, renter_id, workorder_id, owner_id, vendor_id or transaction_id to associate it | An outside condition system can write a finished report or a clip into the same File Library object the inspection report already uses, filed against the right unit or work order |
GET /files | Lists recent files, filterable by age, property, tenant, work order, vendor, transaction or split | Makes the document trail for a unit queryable, which is the raw material of a deposit-dispute record |
GET /files/{id} | Returns metadata, or the binary content with download=true | Prior condition records for a unit can be pulled back out programmatically |
POST /work_orders | Creates work orders with a 1 to 5 priority field, notes and associations | A finding can become dispatched maintenance without a person retyping it |
One practical note for anyone planning around this: the File object in the specification carries filename and bytes but no MIME type field, and the 32 MB interface ceiling is the sensible working assumption for the endpoint too. Plan to write artifacts, not raw footage. Rentec Direct classes the Open API as a Rentec Labs feature, which is the right expectation to hold about pace of change.
Where a condition-analysis layer fits
Rentec Direct made a clear and defensible architectural choice: own the ledger, the portals and the document record, and partner for field capture. The result is a stack where an operator already has remote tenant invitations, offline capture, video on the phone, 360 photos, and an API that can file an artifact against the right unit. Rentec Direct is also unusually clear about why the record exists in the first place. Its own guidance on move-in inspections puts it this way: inspections are used as a baseline to understand who is responsible for repairs or damage during the lease and upon move-out.
What no layer in this stack does, and what almost nothing in the category does yet, is decide what the media means. Whether a mark on a wall is new since move-in. Whether it is damage or fair wear. Whether anything changed between two visits at all. Every submission still lands in front of a person who opens it and judges it against memory or against a PDF from eleven months ago, and that review time scales with door count rather than with problems found. That gap, and what closes it, is the subject of our piece on AI damage detection for long-term rentals.
How RapidEye pairs with a Rentec Direct stack
Keep Rentec Direct as the system of record and keep whatever you already use to capture. A tenant or a team member records a walkthrough on their phone. RapidEye reviews that footage against the unit's own move-in baseline and reports what changed, separating damage from normal wear, with timestamped evidence attached to each finding. Your team opens a result rather than a submission, so adding doors stops adding review hours. The finished report is exactly the kind of artifact the File Library and the /files endpoint were built to hold.
If you are weighing how much of your documentation should move from stills to footage in the first place, our breakdown of video versus photo rental inspections covers where each one wins, and our long-term rental overview covers the move-in to move-out cycle end to end. We track how every major platform handles inspection media in our audit of which property management software supports video inspections.
Quick FAQ
Does Rentec Direct support video inspections?
Yes, through its zInspector integration rather than a native module. Rentec Direct's help documentation describes the zInspector app as a property documentation tool that lets you take photos, videos, and detailed notes, and it names video use cases including recording noisy appliances, recording leaky faucets or pipes, and recording a large area. The video is created and held in the inspection app. What syncs back into Rentec Direct is the finished PDF inspection report, saved automatically to the account File Library and the property's File Library.
Does Rentec Direct have a built-in inspection module?
No. Rentec Direct lists zInspector under Mobile Rental Inspections on its integrated features page, alongside Blue Moon for lease forms and Dropbox Sign for electronic signatures. Every inspection article in the Rentec Direct knowledge base describes the zInspector workflow. Rentec Direct's role is the system of record: reports land in the File Libraries, can be shared to tenant and owner portals, and can be converted into a work order.
Can tenants complete inspections in Rentec Direct?
Yes, through the zInspector integration. Rentec Direct's documentation states that inspections can be processed by you, authorized representatives, and your tenants, and that you can invite individual tenants, selected tenants, or all tenants to complete inspections, with automatic reminders. The native Rentec Direct tenant portal is narrower by design: with the Repairs tab enabled, tenants can report issues that create work orders and upload images to those work orders.
What is the file size limit for uploading video to Rentec Direct?
Rentec Direct File Libraries offer unlimited storage capacity and accept about thirty file types, including mp4, mov, wmv and mpg for video. The documented per-file ceiling is 32 MB, and Rentec Direct notes that a computer, browser, or internet connection might limit an upload to about 25 MB in practice. That ceiling suits a short clip of a specific issue rather than a full multi-minute walkthrough.
Does the Rentec Direct Open API expose inspections?
No. The Rentec Direct API v3 specification covers properties, tenants, leads, owners, vendors, leases, transactions, accounts, products, banks, work orders, files, messaging and lookup. There is no inspections resource, which follows from inspections not being a native Rentec Direct object. The Files endpoints are the relevant surface: an outside system can upload a file and associate it with a property, tenant, work order, owner, vendor or transaction, and can list or download files back.
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.
- Integrated features pages, knowledge base articles on inspections, file libraries and tenant portals, product feature spotlight and Open API blog posts, and the published API v3 specification, Rentec Direct, 2020 to 2026 rentecdirect.com
- Product overview and tenant inspection app pages, zInspector, 2026 zinspector.com