The Part of Inspection Planning Nobody Schedules For: Occupied Units
At 2:15 on a Tuesday, Marcus is parked outside a duplex in South Austin with three stops he is not going to make. The route was clean when he pulled it up that morning: twelve properties in one loop with no backtracking. Then the afternoon took it apart, with two no-answers, one tenant who needed five minutes and used twenty, and one "can you come back Thursday, the baby's asleep."
He is three stops behind, and the last two roll into next week. Marcus inspects for Dana, who runs 312 doors across 220 properties in Austin, so those two doors go back into a pool of several hundred and wait their turn again.
The map was right. All twelve properties were where it said they were, and the order was sane. What the plan never accounted for is what an occupied inspection actually runs on: whether anybody is home, and whether they are fine with you being there.
The short answer
Plan an occupied inspection day around availability as well as distance. Split the due list into occupied and vacant before you route anything. Send every notice for a route day in one batch. Build the occupied route and the vacant route as two separate routes instead of one mixed loop. Put the occupied stops in the hours people actually answer the door. Hold a callback slot later in the week for the reschedule you already know is coming.
An occupied stop is a different unit of work
A vacant-turn route has one schedule in it: yours. You can stack those stops as tightly as the driving allows, start at 7 a.m., and nobody is inconvenienced by the order.
An occupied stop has a second person in it, and that person controls the timing. You owe notice before you enter. They may or may not be home when you arrive. When they are, you knock, you wait, you work around them and the dog and the kid's nap, and you answer questions about the water heater while you are standing there.
Vendor guides put a routine interior inspection at roughly 20 to 30 minutes for an apartment or small home, plus reporting time. That number covers the walkthrough, which is the part you can plan. How long the knocking and waiting and talking takes swings with the tenant, so no honest multiplier exists for it. Your occupied per-stop time is a different number from your vacant one, and you probably do not know yours yet.
So a route built on one flat time per stop is over-packed the moment it fills with occupied doors. The driving is still right; what went wrong is the time per stop, and geography cannot show you that.
The method
This runs on a spreadsheet and a calendar.
1. Split the due list before you route anything
Occupancy is already in your data, since a unit with an active lease is occupied. Pull the due list, add an occupancy column, and break it into two piles.
Then plot each pile separately, using the same map method as any other inspection day: export, import into Google My Maps, read the clusters, pick 8 to 12 properties. The full version of that is in how to plan an inspection day across a rental portfolio. The only change here is that you run it twice, once per pile, instead of once over everything. If your report builder will not carry the last-inspection custom field, export the unit list and keep the dates in one sheet.
2. Check your notice rule, then batch the notices per route day
Most states require advance notice before a non-emergency entry. Twenty-four hours is the most common statutory period. Washington, Arizona and Hawaii require 48. Several states set no number at all, and "reasonable notice" is the working rule from the lease and the circumstances.
California is the one that breaks inspection policies outright. Civil Code §1954 lists the reasons an owner or agent may enter, and a general periodic inspection is not among them. A lease clause does not add one.
Confirm your state's rule once, write the number into the process, and move on. Then send every notice for a given route day in one batch at the time you build the route, instead of stop by stop on the morning of the drive. That way the whole day is legally clear before anyone drives, and the batch is the record you keep if an entry is ever questioned.
3. Build the two routes separately
A vacant route can be packed. An occupied route is the same 8 to 12 properties, planned toward the low end, with real buffer between stops where a vacant route would have a thirteenth stop.
Do not interleave them, because a mixed loop hides its own failure. When the occupied stops run long, the ones that get dropped are whatever is at the end of the day, and on a mixed loop that is usually a vacant door: the stop you could have done in any order, at any hour, with no notice and nobody to accommodate. You just spent the flexible half of your day subsidizing the inflexible half.
4. Put the occupied stops in the hours people answer
Midday and early evening find more people home than mid-morning does. If your team can flex, give the occupied block those hours and spend the dead hours on vacant units, exteriors and drive-bys.
Give the tenant a window. "Between 1 and 4 on Tuesday" is a promise you can keep when a stop runs twenty minutes over. "2:15" is a promise you break three times an afternoon, and a tenant who was told 2:15 and waited until 2:40 is the one who stops answering.
5. Hold a callback slot
On any occupied route, one or two stops will need rebooking, so plan for it. Put a standing block later in the same week on the inspector's calendar and treat it as time that is already spoken for. A no-answer then becomes a Thursday afternoon rebook instead of a door that slides another quarter without anyone noticing.
What VestaGlass does here, and what it does not
The catch in the manual version is step 3. You are buffering an occupied route against a number nobody in your office has ever measured, and the guess never gets corrected, because no one writes down how long the walkthrough actually took. Every occupied day is planned against the same vague sense that these run long.
The split in step 1 is the planner's default. The inspection planner excludes vacant units unless you turn on the "include vacant units" toggle, and the dashboard filters units by vacancy, so you build the occupied route with the toggle off and the vacant route with it on. That is the two-route method in step 3, as two saved routes.
Realistic per-stop time comes from history rather than a rule of thumb. Once an inspector has recorded at least three walkthroughs of units with the same bed and bath count, the planner shows a duration range for that unit shape drawn from that inspector's own recorded times, falling back to the org's times. It is a hint drawn from what actually happened, and it does not predict this visit. The schedule picker then sizes the calendar block from the route's total duration, visit estimates plus the measured drive time between stops, so a five-hour day takes five hours on the calendar instead of three.
For the ordering, VestaGlass shows the drive time for every leg of the order you set, with time-of-day traffic, and recomputes it each time you move a stop, so you can reorder until it is tight. The sequencing decision stays yours.
Planning an inspection day that took about an hour of exporting, sorting and plotting takes a few minutes on the map. That is what we see on the product, not an industry statistic.
The rest stays manual. VestaGlass does not weight a stop by tenant presence, does not know who is home, and does not plan around occupancy. It gives you two clean lists and a measured duration; deciding that an occupied Tuesday carries fewer doors than a vacant one is still your call. It does not generate or send entry notices, so the batch in step 2 happens in Rentvine or in your own template. It does not reserve the callback slot. And Rentvine data is current as of the last sync, not the last second: a stop marked done in VestaGlass updates right away, but a date someone typed into the Rentvine field this morning shows up after tonight's sync.
Three rules worth writing into the SOP
- Occupied and vacant are two routes, always. The vacant route is the movable one, so it is what absorbs a bad week.
- Notices go out in one batch when the route is built, not on the morning of the drive.
- The callback slot is booked time. If nothing reschedules, it becomes a vacant-route afternoon, which is the one kind of work that can be dropped into any empty hour.
Build the occupied route and the vacant route separately
See how VestaGlass turns your Rentvine property data into a usable inspection map.