No photo files to track, just one PDF and one link. Walk the unit with the shot list on your phone and we assemble both for you, usually within minutes of the last photo. Nothing to name, nothing to move, nothing to dig up eight months from now.
Walkthroughs work at any address. Buy them once, use them whenever you turn a unit. See a sample sealed walkthrough.
AB 2801 amended Civil Code section 1950.5 and put photographs at three points in a tenancy. Each one is the same ten minutes and the same shot list. If the tenant has just moved out and you are working out what comes next, start with the full move-out sequence.
The statute asks for photographs within a reasonable time after possession comes back to you, taken before any repair or cleaning you intend to deduct for. The moment a cleaner starts, that condition is gone.
A second set within a reasonable time after those repairs or cleanings are done, so the before and the after both sit in the file next to the cost.
For tenancies starting on or after July 1, 2025, photographs of the unit before the new tenant moves in. This is the baseline everything later gets measured against.
Once it is sealed, nothing in the record can be changed by anyone, including us. Anyone you send it to can check it themselves without taking your word for it.
A verification link and a finished PDF report, both ready before you are back at the car. Attach the PDF to the itemized statement, paste the link in the email, and the file is closed.
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. What follows is a plain description of how the process runs and where the paperwork matters. For advice about your own situation, ask someone licensed to give it.
A deposit disagreement almost never turns on whether damage exists. It turns on when the condition was recorded, and on whether the other side has to take your word for it. Section 1950.5 has always given you 21 days from the return of possession to send back the deposit or an itemized statement of what you kept and why. AB 2801 added photographs to that package.
Most disputed deductions land there. Nobody testifies about pixel forensics. A judge reads the itemized statement, looks at the before and after photographs, and decides whether the two line up. A landlord holding a dated record taken before the cleaners arrived is in a different conversation than one holding a phone roll with no way to show when anything was taken.
Partly. The move-out photographs and the post-repair photographs took effect April 1, 2025 and apply to tenancies whatever their start date. The move-in photographs apply to tenancies beginning on or after July 1, 2025. An older tenancy still has two of the three photo moments attached to it at move-out.
AB 12, chaptered in 2023 and effective July 1, 2024, amended the same section of the Civil Code and limited the deposit to one month's rent for most landlords, furnished or not. A narrow exemption lets some small owners, natural persons or an LLC whose members are all natural persons, owning no more than two residential rental properties with no more than four units between them, take up to two months, and that exemption does not apply when the prospective tenant is a service member.
The two laws push from opposite ends. Less deposit money is held against a unit than before, and more documentation is required before any of it can be kept.
SB 611 moved through the same 2024 session and also amended section 1950.5. Each bill carries a clause incorporating the other's changes, operative only if both were enacted and that bill was enacted last. That is why the section now reads as one merged set of requirements rather than two competing versions, and why a summary of AB 2801 alone does not describe everything in the current text.
The photographs are part of what the statement is supposed to carry, along with a written explanation of the cost of the repairs or cleanings. AB 2801 also bars a landlord who in bad faith fails to comply with the itemized statement requirements from making that claim against the tenant or the deposit. The practical version is simpler: a deduction arriving without the documentation the statute asks for is the weakest position to be in if the tenant pushes back.
A normal photo only carries the date your phone put on it. Phone clocks can be changed. That is what people argue about.
Your phone's clock is not what counts. Your photos are stamped against world time the moment they arrive, and the photos, that time, the location and the address are locked together. After that, nobody can change any of it. Not you, not us.
So your tenant does not have to take your word for it. They open the link and see for themselves whether the record matches. What that is worth in any particular argument is up to them and the court, not us.