TAMPA, Fla. — The City of Tampa is rolling out virtual inspections for homeowners and contractors.
A day in Frank Noto’s life can change by the hour.
“Sometimes, we’re just inside somebody’s home doing easy repairs, ceiling fans, outlets, but on bigger days, we’re running dedicated circuits, and the list goes on,” said Noto.
He’s an electrician for Mr. Electric of Tampa Bay, and in a long day’s work, the inspection process can be time-consuming.
“It’s normally pretty quick, but it takes a long time for the inspector to get to the job site,” said Noto. “You could be waiting anywhere from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. just for about 15 minutes worth of inspecting.”
The City of Tampa is looking to make that process more efficient through the launch of a new virtual building inspections tool, called VuSpex.
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The City said virtual inspections are available for trade permits.
“So for say a window change out or a garage door change out. We call it a trade permit,” said JC Hudgison, the City of Tampa’s Chief Building Official. “A trade permit is intended to be just a one or two inspection. It’s not a large project, a multiple-story project where we’ve got to go multiple times.”
There are two ways it works.
First, you can do an "offline field report," using the app to take photos and videos for an inspector to look over later. The second option is to schedule a live, virtual inspection through the app, where on a video call during your scheduled appointment, the inspector will guide you as if they were there.
“On average, we do probably between 500 and 600 inspections a day,” said Hudgison.
Right now, not all inspections are eligible through the tool.
Hudgison said they have around 35 inspectors and that, ideally, this would help lessen the load.
“The time for us to schedule the inspection, drive out to the site, put it in our system, approve and deny, and leave, we can be able to do that now in 20 minutes,” said Hudgison.
That’s music to some workers’ ears.
“If we can send in pictures at 8 a.m. and get it approved by 10 a.m., we just cut our whole day in half,” said Noto. “We can get to other job sites or complete other work that needs to be completed.”
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