Building inspections and the duty of care: check, record, prove

In March a letter arrives from the liability insurer of a parcel service. Their driver fell on the basement stairs at Am Mühlgraben 4 in January, they write, because the handrail gave way. Did the management know it was loose?

To answer that you need three things: the date of the last inspection walk, what was recorded for the handrail, and what happened next. If those sit in a binder at the office, a photo folder on a work phone and an email to the caretaker, the answer takes an afternoon and convinces nobody.

Where the duty comes from

German courts developed the Verkehrssicherungspflicht from § 823 (1) BGB, the general tort provision of the Civil Code. Whoever creates or maintains a source of danger has to take the precautions that are necessary and reasonable to keep others from harm. For a residential building that means safe paths and stairs, working lights, no loose roofing, and snow and ice cleared in winter.

Since the 2020 reform, the duty for the common property lies with the owners' association itself, which under § 18 (1) WEG is responsible for managing the common property. In practice you organise it as the manager. Whoever hands tasks on, for example to a caretaker or a winter-service firm, has to choose them with care and keep checking that the work gets done.

No statute sets a fixed interval for inspection walks. How often and how closely you look depends on the building: its age, trees on the plot, a playground, an underground car park. Some installations have rules of their own, such as the lift under the Industrial Safety Regulation (Betriebssicherheitsverordnung) and the drinking-water system under the Drinking Water Ordinance (Trinkwasserverordnung). Specialists carry out those inspections, and your job is to make sure they happen on time.

Setting up recurring dates

In Condomana these dates live under Maintenance for each property. A schedule has a title ("Lift inspection", "Spring walk"), an interval in months, the next due date and a lead time in days. You can add the contractor who usually does the job and an inspection checklist.

Condomana does not suggest intervals. You enter which duties your building has and how often, because a wrong default would be worse than none.

When the lead time is reached, Condomana creates a ticket in the defect list with the category Maintenance and the stored contractor, and notifies the management. The next due date moves on by the interval, counted from the old due date. If the spring walk only happens in mid-May, the next one still falls in April. A schedule that should rest for a while can be paused.

The checklist

To start with there is a built-in list, the Building safety walk, which you copy into your own checklists. It is grouped by area: access and paths, stairwell and lighting, basement and building services, playground, roof and facade, fire safety and escape routes, grounds and winter service. Each item is phrased as a statement that should be true, such as "Handrails at steps and ramps are firm" or "Fire doors close by themselves and are not wedged open". Some carry a hint; the playground one says: "Not a substitute for the inspection by a qualified expert."

Condomana itself calls the list a plain starting point and not a legal checklist. Adapt it: the building with a car park gets an item for the roller door, the one without a playground loses that whole group. Changes apply to rounds you start afterwards. Rounds in progress or finished keep the items they started with, so an old report never shows a different list after the fact.

On site

If the maintenance schedule names a checklist, the ticket it creates offers Start inspection round. You can also start a round directly under Inspection rounds. You enter who is inspecting and, if you like, the weather. On a winter walk, "hoar frost, −2 °C" is a useful note later.

Then you walk the building with your phone. Each item gets OK, Defect or n/a, plus a note and photos. Every tap is saved straight away. That needs a network connection, though, so in a basement with no signal you jot it down and enter it upstairs.

If the handrail on the basement stairs is loose, you set the item to Defect, add "Lower handrail wobbles, two wall plugs loose", take a photo and tap Create defect ticket. That creates an ordinary ticket in the defect list. Its title names the area and the checklist item, the description gives the date of the round and your note, and the photos are copied across. The ticket shows "From inspection round …", and the report later lists the ticket reference next to the item.

From there the defect runs like any other: assign a contractor, attach photos of the repaired handrail, mark it handled. The status only moves forward, and when work started and ended cannot be rewritten afterwards.

Finishing and filing

You can only finish once every item has a result. A forgotten item therefore shows up on site rather than when someone reads the report.

When you finish, you choose who may see the report: Nobody (staff only), Advisory board only or All owners of the property. Staff always see it, tenants never do. The advisory board option requires that you have marked board members in the owner list.

Condomana renders a PDF and files it as a document of the property. It contains the property, date, inspector, weather and the time the round was finished, every item with its result, note and photos, a list of the defects found with their ticket references, and at the end lines for place, date and signature. If you need a signature on paper, print it and sign.

The round is read-only from then on. If you recorded something wrongly, the correction goes into a new round. In the property's building logbook, finished rounds appear alongside defects, maintenance and resolutions, and owners see only what has been released to them.

You close the maintenance ticket that prompted the round yourself once everything is done. Finishing the round does not change it.

What the records can show

Back to the basement stairs. With this chain you can show that the walk was due in October and took place, who did it, that the handrail was recorded as OK at the time and what it looked like in the photo. Or you can show that it was recorded as a defect, went to the metalworker the same day and was handled two weeks later.

Whether that suffices in a particular case is for others to decide. Without these records you have only your memory, and that of a caretaker who may no longer work for you.

What Condomana does not do here

Condomana does not decide which inspections your building needs or how often. The built-in checklist does not cover everything the duty of care for a particular building requires. It does not replace inspections by qualified experts, whether of the lift or of playground equipment. And whether a component is common or separate property is set out in the declaration of division (Teilungserklärung).

The essentials

• Courts derive the duty from § 823 (1) BGB; for the common property it lies with the association, and the management organises it.
• Recurring checks go in as maintenance schedules with your own intervals. When one comes due, it appears as a ticket in the defect list.
• The inspection round runs on your phone against your checklist, and any defect becomes a ticket with photos in one tap.
• Finishing produces a PDF report that cannot be changed, shown to staff only, the advisory board or all owners as you choose.
• For handling a damage case from there: Water damage: from the tenant's report to a closed defect.