Why Most Check-In Reports Fail at Deposit Tribunals

You did everything right. You took photos before the tenant moved in, wrote up a detailed inventory, and even got them to sign it. Then at the end of the tenancy, there was real damage — stained carpets, scuffed walls, a broken appliance. You submitted your deduction request to the deposit scheme. The tenant disputed it.

The adjudicator reduced your claim by 60%.

If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. Landlords with genuine claims lose more than they should — not because the damage wasn't real, but because the evidence didn't hold up. Here's why.

Problem 1: PDF Reports Can Be Edited After Signing

Most landlords use Word documents or PDF templates for their check-in reports. The problem is that PDFs — even signed ones — can be modified. Editing the text of a signed PDF is not difficult, and adjudicators know this.

If a tenant argues that your report was altered after they signed it, the burden of proof shifts to you. You have to prove the document hasn't changed. With a standard PDF on your hard drive, you can't.

Deposit schemes — TDS, DPS, and mydeposits — all accept electronic signatures, but they're also well aware of how easily documents can be tampered with. A report that looks like it could have been modified will be treated with scepticism.

Problem 2: Photos With No Verifiable Metadata

Photos taken on a smartphone contain metadata: the timestamp, the device model, sometimes the GPS location. But when photos are compressed, emailed, uploaded to Dropbox, or saved from WhatsApp, that metadata is often stripped.

An adjudicator looking at a photo with no metadata can't confirm when it was taken. A photo with a timestamp from three weeks before the tenancy started is worse — it suggests the photo may not represent the property at move-in.

The standard that actually holds up: photos uploaded directly from a device at the time of inspection, with metadata preserved and independently verified by the platform storing them.

Problem 3: No Chain of Custody

A report that starts on one person's phone, gets emailed to a Dropbox folder, is forwarded as a PDF, printed out, scanned back in, and then uploaded to a dispute portal has been through a lot of hands. Any one of those steps could have introduced an alteration — and the tenant's representative will point that out.

Chain of custody matters in legal disputes. It matters to deposit scheme adjudicators too. If you can't show that the document has been in an unbroken, tamper-free record from the moment of the inspection to the moment of the dispute, its credibility is weakened.

Problem 4: One-Sided Reports

A check-in report signed only by the landlord proves very little. The tenant can claim they never saw it, never agreed to the described condition, or signed something different.

The tenant's signature on the same version of the report you're submitting is what closes this argument. It means they had the opportunity to dispute the condition at the start of the tenancy and didn't. Without it, the tenant can introduce doubt — and doubt generally goes in their favour.

What Deposit Tribunals Actually Want to See

Adjudicators at TDS, DPS, and mydeposits aren't trying to catch landlords out. They're trying to make fair decisions based on credible evidence. What they find credible:

Timestamped photos. Taken on the day of the inspection, with a timestamp that can be independently verified — not just from the EXIF data that anyone could edit, but from a server-side record of when the upload occurred.

Metadata that matches the story. If the report says the inspection was on 15 March, the photos should show timestamps from 15 March. Photos from a week later suggest you went back in. Photos from a week earlier suggest you didn't bother on the actual day.

Dual sign-off. Both parties — landlord and tenant — signed the same record. This shows mutual agreement at the time, which is much harder to dispute later.

An unbroken audit trail. Ideally, the report lives in one place from creation to dispute, with a log showing who accessed it and when. That log is what demonstrates the document hasn't been touched since both parties signed.

Cryptographic verification. This sounds technical, but it's straightforward in practice. When a file is uploaded to a platform that uses cryptographic hashing, a unique digital fingerprint is generated for that exact file. If even a single pixel changes, the fingerprint changes. This is how you prove a document hasn't been altered since it was created.

Solving Each Problem

The issues above aren't unsolvable. They're just the result of using tools — Word documents, email, shared drives — that weren't designed for evidential purposes.

Using a platform that stores photos and reports with server-side timestamps, preserves metadata, requires both parties to sign the same record, and generates cryptographic hashes at the moment of upload addresses every problem described here.

Fairhold was built to do exactly that. But even if you don't use Fairhold, the framework for what good evidence looks like is the same. Whatever tool you use, you need: verified timestamps, preserved metadata, mutual sign-off, and an audit trail that shows the record hasn't changed.

That's the standard. It's not impossibly high. It's just higher than a PDF on your hard drive.