Photograph everything: a tenant's guide to move-in evidence

Deposit disputes are almost never arguments about facts. They are arguments about who can prove them. The tenant remembers the scuff was already there; the landlord remembers otherwise; six months later neither has anything but memory, and the party holding the money wins by default.

Twenty minutes on move-in day removes the argument entirely.

The move-in pass

Walk every room before anything comes off the truck, and photograph in this order:

1. Wide shot of each room from the doorway, so the condition is placed in context.
2. Every wall at eye level, including behind where furniture will sit.
3. Floors, particularly at thresholds and under windows where water damage starts.
4. Every appliance, inside and out, plus the model plate.
5. Bathroom sealant, grout and under-sink plumbing. This is where slow leaks hide.
6. Windows and their frames, open and closed.
7. Existing damage, close up, with something for scale.
8. Every meter reading on day one.

Make sure the timestamps are intact and back the set up somewhere that is not your phone.

During the tenancy

Photograph the things you report. If you raise a repair, attach an image to the report. If the walkway has not been cleared two days after a storm, photograph it with the date visible. If a promised repair is still outstanding a month later, photograph the same spot again.

You are not building a case for court. You are building a record that makes a claim concrete, and concrete claims get resolved faster.

The move-out pass

Repeat the move-in pass in the same order, in the same rooms, from the same angles. A matched pair of before-and-after photographs is close to unarguable, which is exactly why it tends to end the conversation before it starts.

Put the evidence where it does the most good

Photographs sitting in your camera roll protect you. Photographs attached to a review protect the next tenant too, and that is the point of the whole exercise. RentersBook lets tenants upload images alongside a review precisely so that a claim about a building can be shown rather than asserted.

A review that says the laundry room was unreliable is an opinion. A review that says it and shows one working machine in January is a fact.