What a Condition Report Is For

Why this matters

Most shops that write condition reports write them for the wrong reason. They think they are building evidence for a dispute that may never come. That is a by-product. A condition report is a pricing instrument: its job is to take each unknown you can observe and push it into one of three boxes - included, excluded, or covered by a stated allowance - before the number is committed. Do that and the report changes the quote. Write the same report after the quote and it changes nothing, because there is no longer anything to allocate. Worse, it now proves you knew.

What it is not

It is not a photo dump. Forty images with no reading attached are a record of your camera, not of a condition. Every image in a real report is captioned with what it shows and what it implies for the work.

It is not a punch list. A punch list is a list of things to fix. A condition report includes things nobody is going to fix and things you are specifically declining to touch, and those entries are often the valuable ones.

It is not a defence. If your only reason for writing it is a dispute you are anticipating, you will write it in the wrong register, at the wrong time, and it will read to a customer exactly the way it was written.

The property that makes it work

The report precedes the number. That is the whole mechanism.

Before the price exists, every observation has three live destinations. Include it and you have priced it. Exclude it and the customer keeps it, with the reason stated. Cover it with an allowance and you have split it: a defined quantity of work is in the price and anything past that quantity is trued up against actual.

After the price exists, all three doors are closed. The observation has nowhere to go, so it becomes a note about something you have already agreed to deliver. That is why a late report is not merely less useful, it is negatively useful: it documents knowledge without allocation, which is the exact combination you would least like to have on file.

The fields, and what each has to produce

Each field is judged by whether it can move a line on a quote. A field that cannot is decoration.

• Date, observer, and conditions at observation. Weather, light, occupancy, what was accessible. This is what lets a reader a year later know what you could and could not have seen.
• Age of the structure or system. Because age triggers regulatory obligations, not because old means bad. This one field routinely adds hours.
• Component inventory with a condition read per component, using a class you apply consistently, not adjectives.
• The unknowns table, which is the body of the report: each observation, what it could mean, and its disposition.
• Regulatory triggers, stated separately so they cannot be lost inside a condition line.
• Safety findings, on their own, never traded against price.
• Access constraints, because access is a cost driver that is invisible from a photograph.
• Delivery record: who received it and when.

The filled artifact

Property: single-family residence, built 1968. Scope requested: full exterior wash, prep and recoat. Observed: one visit, dry conditions, ground level plus ladder inspection on two elevations, occupied.

Regulatory trigger. Constructed before 1978. Exterior surface preparation on painted surfaces of pre-1978 target housing falls under the EPA Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule, 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart E, which requires that the firm be EPA-certified, that a certified renovator direct the work, and that lead-safe work practices including containment and cleaning verification be used. The rule's exterior de minimis exemption is small, on the order of 20 square feet of disturbed surface, and a whole-elevation scrape and wash is far past it. This is not a condition, it is a cost, and it belongs in the price rather than in a footnote.

Conditions observed:

Safety finding, item 6, stated in full. No work occurs on the north elevation until the serving utility has been contacted and the conductors have been de-energized, covered, or relocated. No employee works in proximity to an energized power circuit where contact is possible in the course of the work unless the circuit is de-energized and grounded or effectively guarded (29 CFR 1926.416(a)(1) in construction; the general-industry counterpart for unqualified persons and overhead lines is 29 CFR 1910.333(c)(3), which sets minimum approach distances). No portable ladder with conductive side rails is used anywhere it or the person on it could contact exposed energized parts, which is addressed in the construction ladder standard at 29 CFR 1926.1053. That finding goes to the customer in writing on the day it is observed, whether or not they buy anything, because a service drop 4 feet off a wall is a hazard to whoever works there next, including a homeowner with a ladder.

Pressure washing and scraping under item 1 create their own airborne route. Under the RRP rule the disturbance is managed with containment, ground covering and cleaning verification rather than with a dust mask; where dry scraping or sanding of a lead-containing coating is unavoidable, respiratory protection has to come from a written respirator program under 29 CFR 1910.134 with fit testing, not from a filtering facepiece handed out of the van.

What the report changed

The pre-report figure was 46 hours of labour for wash, prep and coat.

The report moved five lines:

1. Added 9 hours across the job for RRP containment, ground covering and cleaning verification. Nobody quotes those hours from a phone call, and a shop that discovers the build date on day one absorbs them.
2. Converted the south elevation prep from an unknown to an allowance, with 20% of that elevation as the stated quantity and a true-up mechanism past it. The allowance is a quantity and a rule, not a guess.
3. Removed the east elevation carpentry from the recoat and quoted it separately at 4.0 hours, so a coating warranty is not sitting on top of rotten substrate.
4. Added the glazing allowance at 6 openings and 0.5 hours each, 3.0 hours, with the same true-up shape.
5. Removed one elevation from the price entirely pending the utility.

Item 3 in the table changed no hours at all and is arguably the most valuable line in the report, because it is the one that says out loud that the recoat will fail again on that elevation if the drainage is not corrected. That sentence is what stops a customer from calling in eighteen months about a coating failure the shop predicted and did not write down.

Now run the counterfactual. Same observations, same photographs, same accuracy, written the week after the price was accepted at 46 hours. The RRP hours are absorbed. The prep is unbounded because no allowance was stated. The carpentry is arguably inside a scope that said "exterior." The drainage is a known cause of a future failure on work the shop has already promised. And the north elevation is inside a job the shop has agreed to complete, which turns a utility coordination issue into a schedule failure the shop owns.

Every single fact in the report is identical. Its value went from five changed lines to zero, and its net effect went from allocation to proof of knowledge.

When not to write one

A condition report costs real time and it should not be reflexive.

Skip it when the depth of your work does not reach the unknowns. A like-for-like component swap on an accessible system does not need a property survey. State the depth on the invoice instead.

Skip it when the observing act cannot be performed. A report full of "unable to inspect" lines is worse than no report, because it tells a reader you looked and gives them a list of the things you did not see. If access is the problem, price the access or exclude the area.

Skip it when you have already priced. Not because the information is worthless, but because you must not confuse yourself about what it now is. After the price, write findings and hand them back as findings. See related: The Pre-Existing Condition and How to Hand It Back, which covers that instrument, and note it does a different job with a different trigger.

The one measurement that tells you the report worked

Count the line items it changed.

A condition report that added no hours, stated no allowance, excluded nothing and held nothing back did not do its job. Either the property genuinely had no unknowns, which happens and is worth noting, or the report arrived after the number. Track that count across a quarter: if your average is under one changed line per report, you are writing evidence, and you are paying for it in hours you spend and hours you absorb.

References

• 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart E, EPA Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule (pre-1978 target housing and child-occupied facilities)
• 29 CFR 1926.416(a)(1), work near energized circuits (construction); 29 CFR 1910.333(c)(3), unqualified persons and overhead lines (general industry); 29 CFR 1926.1053, ladders (construction)
• 29 CFR 1910.134, respiratory protection program requirements
• See related: The Site Walk Before You Quote
• See related: Estimating the Unknown: The Conditions Clause