Pre-Handover Walkthrough Video for Housesit

As homeowners prepare to leave a home, some write notes and others prepare a pre-handover walkthrough as a video. This combination is the best approach to have a written reference and an audio visual reference to guide the housesitters in their role. Here are some top tips to how to get the best our of your preparatory video for the sitters.

The Pre-Handover Walkthrough: How Homeowners Should Document a Property Before Someone Else Moves In to Watch It

The front door is open, the suitcase is in the car, and the house sitter is standing in your kitchen holding a set of keys and the coffee you poured for them. You have about 40 minutes before you need to leave for the airport. Somewhere in that window, you’re supposed to hand off a house, two cats, a temperamental boiler, and a decade of accumulated stuff to a near-stranger, and come away with a shared record of what the place looked like when the keys changed hands.

housesitter arriving in the home — Prepare for your housesitter’s arrival with a pre-handover walkthrough video
Photo credit – SHVETS production

Prepare a Pre-Handover Walkthrough Video

Most people skip the record. They walk through the house, point at things, say “and that’s the weird switch, don’t worry about it,” and leave. Then something happens. A stain, a scratch, a missing lid, a dispute about who broke what, and nobody can agree on what the place looked like the moment you drove off. A walkthrough video settles all of it, and almost nobody shoots one properly.

Start the Camera Before You Start the Tour

The video has to exist before the handover conversation begins, not after. Walk the house alone first, phone in landscape, camera rolling, narrating as you go. One continuous take beats a folder of clean clips, because the timestamp and the unbroken motion are what make it credible later. Stop and restart in every room and you’ve built a highlight reel. Walk the whole house in one pass, and you’ve built a document.

The California Department of Insurance recommends essentially this method for home inventories: walk through with a video camera, open drawers and closets, narrate what you’re seeing, and keep a copy somewhere that isn’t the house. The same discipline works for a pre-handover walkthrough. You’re making a boring, thorough, slightly rambling record that a reasonable person could watch six weeks from now and know what the place looked like today.

If a property manager is involved, the kind of property management company that handles rentals in your absence, send the file through their system so there’s a timestamped trail of what you handed over, the same way they keep a paper trail with tenants.

Narrate the Flaws Louder Than the Features

pre-handover walkthrough video by the homeowner — Recording your own pre-handover walkthrough video for the housesitter allows you to give details that are not obvious
Photo credit – Alena Darmel

The instinct is to show off the house in a pre-handover walkthrough. But the point of the video is the chipped tile, the cabinet door that won’t close, the water ring on the nightstand, and the scratch on the hardwood by the patio door. Say them out loud as the camera sees them.

“There’s a dent in the fridge, lower left, it was there when we bought it.” “The grout in this corner is already cracked.” “This window latch doesn’t fully engage, we leave it as is.”

Narrating flaws does two things for you. It removes the most common dispute a sitter will ever face, where something you’d forgotten about looks, to them, like something they must have caused. It also lowers the temperature of the whole arrangement. A sitter who hears you call out existing damage without drama understands that you’re not building a case to blame them later.

Film the Things You’d Never Think to Film

The rooms film themselves. It’s the in-between spaces that matter more and get skipped. Shoot these deliberately in your pre-handover walkthrough, it really helps:

The utility shutoffs. Water main, gas valve, electrical panel, boiler reset. Show where each one lives and how it turns off.
Inside the appliances. Open the fridge, the freezer, the dishwasher, the washer, the oven. A quick pan inside proves what was in there and what condition it was in.
Under the sinks. Slow leaks start here and get noticed late. A ten-second shot of a dry cabinet floor today is worth a lot if something shows up tomorrow.
The exterior perimeter. Fences, gates, outdoor furniture, the state of the lawn, any existing damage to siding or gutters.
Anything valuable or breakable. A ring on the dresser, a laptop on the desk, art on the walls, so there’s no question about what was present when you left.

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Hand the Video Over, and Keep a Copy They Can’t Edit

Send the sitter the file before you leave, by whatever method timestamps it on their end: email with the attachment, a shared cloud folder, a messaging app that logs the send. Ask them to confirm receipt in writing. If they want to add anything they noticed that you missed, that reply is where it goes. You now have a two-party record both of you agreed to in the same hour.

Store your own copy somewhere that isn’t the phone in your pocket on the trip. Cloud backup, a second device at home, an email to yourself- anywhere the original survives if the phone goes in a pool. Guidance from the Equal Housing Council for landlords and tenants makes the same point about move-in condition records: dated documentation, both parties holding copies, created before anyone takes possession. A sitter arrangement isn’t a tenancy, but the logic is identical.

Final Thoughts of a Pre-handover Walkthrough

The Video Is the Only Version of the House That Doesn’t Change

A house in use drifts. Things get moved, cleaned, broken, replaced, forgotten. Memory drifts along with it, yours and theirs. In three weeks, nobody will remember exactly where the lamp was, whether the rug had that fold, whether the stain on the ceiling was already there.

The video will. Spend the 40 minutes before you leave making one, and most of the arguments that would otherwise happen on your return simply never start.