How to use Google Forms to create a house inspection checklist

First some background,

I am relatively new to full time RE investing but have more than 20 years of experience in software development. Recently I stepped up the number of properties I am visiting to 8-12 a week and realized that writing notes while checking out a house was not enough. Frequently I ended up in a situation like this: Visit a number of houses, take notes on each one and then go back to the office to calculate to rehab costs only to realize that I had no idea what the condition of the chimney in house A was. How old was the boiler in house B? Was there a hookup for a dishwasher  in house C?

After reading the excellent “BiggerPockets presents… The Book on Estimating Rehab Costs” by J. Scott, I got the idea to make a checklist to encompass all the issues I need to be aware of when visiting a property. Since I have a  background in software development, a paper checklist was out and software was in (to a hammer everything looks like a nail).

Writing custom software to do this before I was sure of the details would be too much, so I decided to use Google Forms.

The advantages of this solution are:

• It is very quick and simple.
• I can easily modify my checklist when I encounter issues that were not covered in the original.
• I can import the data from my checklist into my rehab cost spreadsheet.
• I get all sorts of statistics about the houses I visit with no effort.

The way I use my checklist is this:

• I have a bookmark of the form location on my smartphone.
• Before I enter a property I select the bookmark and wait for the form to load (once in the house I may not have reception).
• I walk the house in the same order as in my list. First walk around the outside, kitchen, basement, etc.
• When I exit the house I press the <Submit> button to save the list.
• Shorty after, I receive an email with all the entered data in an attachment.
• I import the data into my spreadsheet, (you can use Excel, Google docs, etc).
• Finally if I am still interested in the property, I use the form data as the basis of my rehab cost estimate. (I plan to describe this part of the process in a later post.)

You can use the SFH Property Condition Checklist by following the link.

Well, that's it for my first blog entry but later on I plan to describe how to use the data captured by the form to estimate rehab costs. Please let me know if you would like me to cover the subject with more detail.