What Is Not Recorded Eventually Disappears

An ingoing inspection is the walk through a rental that landlord and tenant do together before the tenant moves in, writing down every crack and stain, so that the end of the lease has something to be compared against.

Without it, the start of the tenancy simply disappears. By the time the lease ends, nobody can say with confidence whether the chipped basin was chipped in the first month or the last, and the landlord's memory and the tenant's memory will each lean towards their own pocket. The deposit, which has been sitting in an interest bearing account the whole time, becomes the thing they fight over. A list signed at the start settles most of these questions before anyone asks them, and dated photographs settle more.

The same fate meets any decision that lives only in conversation. Permission given on the phone to paint a bedroom is a real agreement until a new managing agent arrives, finds painted walls and no note anywhere, and treats the paint as damage. The agreement was real while both people remembered it. After that it stopped existing.