The documentWhat a schedule of condition is
A schedule of condition is a description of a flat on one particular day, made so that the same flat can be described again later and the two descriptions compared. It is not a valuation, not an insurance document and not a list of contents for its own sake. Its only purpose is to make an argument at the end of an occupation unnecessary, and it does that by being boring, complete and dated.
It is made at the start of every occupation on shelves three and four, and once a quarter on shelves one and two where there is no single tenant to sign it.
MethodHow the schedule is made
The flat is walked in the same numbered order every time, and the order is written on the front of the schedule. Walking the rooms in a different order each visit is how a cupboard gets missed, and a cupboard that is missed at the start is a cupboard that cannot be argued about at the end.
A one-bedroom flat walked in five numbered rooms, with the meter cupboard read last.
Each room is described in the same four lines: walls and ceiling, floor covering, joinery and glazing, and fittings. Each line gets a condition word from a fixed short list rather than a sentence, because a fixed list can be compared and a sentence cannot. Anything that is already marked, chipped, scratched or stained is photographed close enough to see what it is and far enough back to see where it is, and both photographs go in.
FilesWhat the photographs are called
Photographs are named with the room number, the item and the date, in that order, and they are never renamed afterwards. A file called by its room and its date can be found in a year by somebody who was not there; a file called by the number a camera gave it cannot. The schedule references the file names in its margin so the reader can go straight to the picture a line is talking about.
Not roomsMeters, keys and the things that are not rooms
Three things sit at the end of every schedule because they are not part of any room. The meter serial numbers and their readings, photographed with the serial legible in the same frame as the dial. The keys: how many of each, which doors they open, and the number on the tag. And the safety items: the alarm positions, the date each was last pressed, and whether the carbon monoxide alarm is in the room the regulations require it to be in.
A reading without a serial number is useless, because it cannot be matched to a supplier's account later. That is why they are photographed together rather than written down separately.
ComparisonCheck-out and the difference that matters
The check-out repeats the schedule exactly: same order, same four lines a room, same condition words, same photographs from the same positions. The comparison is then mechanical, and anything that has changed is visible without interpretation.
What follows is a judgement, and it is made in writing. Fair wear and tear is the ordinary result of people living somewhere for the length of time they lived there, and it is not chargeable. Damage is something that would not have happened without an act or a neglect, and it is. A scuffed skirting after a long tenancy is the first. A door that has been taken off its hinges and put back on upside down is the second.