Using Hand Signals Instead of Annotations

We're tackling a productivity killer hiding in plain sight: excessive photo annotations.

Through careful timing and analysis, we've discovered that adding just two annotations to a photo takes about 11 seconds. For inspectors who annotate all 150 photos in an average report, that's 27.5 minutes per inspection—or a staggering 91+ hours annually for someone doing 200 inspections per year. That's over two full work weeks spent drawing arrows and circles! When translated to dollars, we're talking about $11,000-$20,000 in potential lost revenue.

The solution? Hand signals. Simply pointing to defects in your photos can communicate just as effectively—sometimes better—than digital annotations. Not only does this approach save tremendous time, but it also adds a human element to your reports that clients appreciate. As fellow inspector Preston Kincaid demonstrated, a well-placed hand gesture can instantly communicate issues like uneven stair risers more effectively than words or digital markers. And while we're not suggesting eliminating annotations completely, reserving them for the 10% of photos that truly need them can dramatically improve your efficiency.

We also touch on the value of improving your photography skills. With better-composed photos that naturally highlight defects, you'll further reduce annotation needs while creating more intuitive reports. Ultimately, it's about delivering a superior product while working smarter, not harder. Have you tried using hand signals instead of annotations? We'd love to hear your experiences! And don't forget to subscribe to catch our future episodes exploring more ways to optimize your inspection business.

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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Report Optimization
• 1:42 The Math Behind Photo Annotations
• 4:36 Annual Cost of Annotation Habits
• 7:25 Benefits of Using Hand Signals
• 10:20 Improving Photo Quality Over Annotations

Transcript

Ian Robertson  
Hey, there IT crowd. Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. So today we're going to jump back into some of our report optimization stuff that we've been talking about this year. It's been going great, getting lots of positive feedback, lots of recommendations from experienced home inspectors, and just wanted to continue this series, because it's been really good. And it's something that's close to my heart. I mean, Inspector Toolbelt is, in of itself, home inspection software. This podcast is based on that. And we want to write great reports, and we want to optimize our time. 

So today we're going to talk about a way that we can optimize our time. And you notice, I'll say, optimize our time, or be more efficient, and not use the word fast. I hate that word fast. I don't want to inspect fast. I want to inspect thoroughly but efficiently. So a lot of new home inspectors will say, how do I get faster? Well, we're going to talk about that today with this and using hand signals instead of annotations. Now that doesn't mean that we never use annotations. That's not what I'm saying. What this means, though, is that we opt for our default being hand signals. And I stole this from another inspector years ago. I saw one of the reports. I'm like, oh, these hand signals made a lot of sense. And you know, a lot of big inspection companies do that, if you look at a lot of sample reports, and when I say hand signals, I'm not talking about sign language. But if there's a defect on the chimney, you'll see a picture of the chimney and their hand pointing to it. Or, you know, if you're like AJ, you had that little white extendable hand thing that he carries around. However we do it, it's very effective. But now we may be very attached to our annotations, and they do have their place. So you'll find annotations in almost every single one of my reports, but you'll find them on about maybe a half a dozen or dozen pictures at most, sometimes maybe just one picture. If it's a really clean house, I might struggle to find one picture to put an annotation on. There's several reasons why. 

But first of all, let's talk about the math of an annotation. So I did the math for you, went and I actually timed how long on average it took me to add an annotation to a picture. So if you use Inspector Toolbelt, we have an auto annotation feature. It doesn't automatically annotate the photo, but it'll open the photo in the annotation panel so you can annotate it, click done, and off you go. Sometimes you're just going in, clicking on the photos, depends on which software you're using. On average, to add two annotations to a photo took me about 11 seconds from the time that the photo appeared, I'd click on the photo, find what I wanted to point at. And this was just very quick. It actually takes longer if you want to add more annotations or get a little bit more creative with it. This is just adding straight up arrows, two of them. And the reason I took that was, well, first of all, that's an average number of annotations that we see typically, you know, anecdotally speaking, on a photo, sometimes one, sometimes I've seen where you can barely see the photo, and there's, like, you know, 12 annotations on that photo of pointing to different things. 

But this actually came up because a user contacted us one day, and he had almost 300 photos in his report, and he annotated every single one of them, multiple annotations, captions on every photo. And I actually had to stop and think if I were a consumer, if I were his client, would I be cool with this? I found it, to be perfectly frank, distracting, because here we are. I want to know what the big things are, and I'm looking through all these photos with annotations, and it made everything look big and scary, to be frank, but it was just complicated. Like dishwasher works, send me a picture of the dishwasher if you want or don't. I just need to know if it works. Instead, he has pictures and diagrams and says, you know, here's the front of the dishwasher, here's the side of the dishwasher. Okay, if that's what you want to do, cool, if that's your stick and your clients like that, but here's the reality of it. On average, and again, this is anecdotally speaking, with the reports that we have that come through our software and things like that. On average, most home inspectors have about 150 photos per inspection, some way more, some way less, but on average, about 150 photos. So if you count 11 seconds for two annotations per photo, if you were to annotate all 150 photos, that would take you 27.5 minutes every inspection, an extra 27 minutes to add annotations to a photo. Well, let's say you're like, well, I'm not unreasonable, I only do about a third of mine. That would take you an extra 9.1 minutes, approximately. I took off the extra decimals at the end, or not the extra numbers on the decimal after the decimal. Sorry. I apparently don't know where decimals go. 

Let's say we're like, well, no, I'm very well within reason, Ian says he does a half a dozen or a dozen. I only do 20. That equals an extra 3.67 minutes per inspection. So now we may say, well, isn't that worth it? Well, let's do some math. Going back to the 150 photos, if we annotated all of those and we did an average of 200 inspections a year, that would take us an extra 91.67 hours a year. Let me repeat that, 91.67 hours per year. We spend over two weeks just annotating all those photos throughout the year that, to be perfectly frank, probably irritate more than help if we're doing that many that that is. If we did 50 photos per report that we annotate, that's an average of 30.33 hours per year, almost a full week's worth of work. You could take off and go to Orlando with the kids with that amount of time. And even if we did 20 photos a year, that's 12.23 hours a year. That's a full day and a half. That equals, if we're charging $500 per inspection, that equals three full inspections, that's 1500 bucks. And if you're doing ancillaries, you know, there's companies out there, like we've had some on here, and we've talked about our pricing, you know, that's, that's up to $3,000 and just annotating 20 photos a year. And then, if we're looking at, you know, the 150, let's do that math again, 150 photos annotated on each inspection, on average, 91 hours a year of just annotating. I mean, if we're doing two inspections a day, and let's go to the low number. Low number being 500. Two inspections a day, five days a week, that's $10,000 over the course of two weeks, plus the extra 10 hours, which is, let's say, another 1000, that's $11,000 a year annotating photos on the low end. If you're on the high end, that's a little over 20,000 actually. 

So all that math just says we spend a lot of time annotating photos when 90% of the photos probably didn't need to get annotated. Now I might get some pushback, like, well, my client doesn't know what the left side of the dishwasher looks like. Oh, okay, cool. That's fine. If I have a picky client, and they're just like, can you show me where all the nails are in the attic? Yeah, I'm gonna give them an arrow and show them where the nail is. But most people aren't like that. Most of the time we don't even need to put in the picture of a dishwasher if it's fine. That's a whole different subject of how many pictures should we put in versus how many pictures the client actually wants. But we'll save that for another time. But just going by these numbers, how much extra time does it take to add a hand signal like, okay, we're pointing at the front steps, and we want to let them know that the left hand rail is loose, and we put our finger in the shot and we point to that handrail. If you took a cumulative number of shots, even without doing this on a regular basis, it would maybe take an extra minute per inspection, cumulatively over the course of, you know, 30 to 50 pictures, it's almost immeasurable. And then once you're good at it, you don't even think and you just put in the hand signals. Preston Kincaid, I did a podcast episode with him on his podcast, and we talked about hand signals. And he actually has a whole thing on this, and it makes a lot of sense. It's natural for a person to think, okay, when we talk, we gesture, and we actually watch people's hands, and it adds to an element to the story, or whatever they're telling. He did a couple of shots where he showed steps where the risers were too big. So he took a picture of his fingers close together, like this riser is too short and this one's too wide. And he pulled his fingers apart and took another shot. I tell you what, that one shot without showing us the narrative, everybody sitting on that webinar knew exactly what was the issue after that. It's amazing how good you can get with hand signals or just pointing. 

Try it out, see if it helps you, because these are big hours, and we may say, well, my schedule is not full, so I don't need...optimize now, when your schedule is not full, when things may be not going really great. Maybe we only have three inspections, so I can spend an extra 12 hours, you know, adding annotations, you might find that your clients actually like it. And I've had agents comment on it, they're like, yeah, we knew exactly where it was because Ian was pointing to it. And it adds a human element to our reports, which, in an age when AI and there's a lack of human element in a lot of things. Sometimes people appreciate that more. Now, does that mean, again, that we don't add any annotations to our photos? No, of course not. Sometimes I'll put a picture of a roof on there, and I just have one big photo saying multiple locations of shingle damage. And I'll just put, you know, eight, nine, 10, arrows on there, just to make the point. Like, all right, you guys can fight this, but here's a lot of little bits of damage. They need to be on there. Now we may not be as extreme as having 300 annotated photos in our report, and if we do, you know, and that's what we want to do, that's fine, but think about the math a little bit. So for those of us who have 300 annotated photos in a report, let's double that 150 number. That's a full month. That is 182 hours of work, a full month, over a month of just annotating photos. How much money can we make in a month by just using hand signals, do the same thing, provide the same level of report, and possibly even a better report by increasing our hand signals or taking better pictures. And that's the point I wanted to end on. 

Sometimes our pictures stink. It may be worth it sometime to do just a little quick, couple hour photography course, and I know for me, that has helped doing research on photography, because it talks about subject matter. Like people get upset at a photo and they're like, I don't know what the issue is here. It's because we didn't put the subject in the right frame. And you'll take two hours. Ask ChatGPT, say, tell me how to take a better photo. Here's a photo. Make suggestions on how I could have made this more apparent. Once it becomes second nature, people are like, great photos, awesome. Like that loose handrail, if you angle your camera just right, the handrail that's loose is already in the shot, and they're like, oh, it must be the left handrail. That's a little bit more advanced. You don't have to do it. But I tell you, that little extra effort helped me to have way better photos in my report, and then I could focus on, instead of standing there adding annotations to everything, I could focus on the inspection, my client asking questions, did I miss anything over here? Let me walk around the house one more time. I was able to deliver a better product. My clients are thrilled with our reports, and I didn't waste my time annotating all these different photos. 

So if you agree, disagree, let me know. We'd love to hear from you. But this is what I have found that has worked for me. So thank you very much, and we look forward to talking to you all again on the next episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at info@inspectortoolbelt.com.

If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.

*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.