AI inspections for Alto

Overview

Alto is exceptionally good at knowing that an inspection is due, and holds almost nothing about what the inspection found. The Property Management Dashboard tracks every event date across the portfolio, works orders move through their statuses, and the audit trail is there when a landlord asks. Condition itself lives somewhere else: on a property manager's phone, in an email to the landlord, in a PDF from a partner app. RapidEye reads the property and tenancy list from Alto so each finding lands on the right address, reads the photos those visits produce, and returns one card per problem with the earlier photo of the same spot beside the new one and the dates on either side.

How it works with Alto

Alto already sorts the lettings year into the visits an agency makes, so the checks follow those. What is listed here is where agencies start, not the boundary of the product: RapidEye reads whatever documentation your team produces, video walkthroughs and scans included, and scores it against the standard you set rather than a generic one, so if your use case is not on this list it is worth asking about.

• Move-in. Whatever your manager or inventory clerk photographs at the start of a tenancy becomes the baseline for that address. Everything after it is read as a change against that set rather than against a memory of how the flat looked.
• Routine property inspections. The visit Alto schedules and reminds you about. RapidEye reads the photos from it and returns what has moved since the last visit: a growing damp patch, a broken blind, an appliance gone, a smoke alarm off the ceiling.
• Works orders. A job instructed to a supplier comes back marked done. RapidEye reads the photo of the finished work against the photo of the problem and flags the ones where nothing in the picture changed.
• Tenant-reported issues. Photos a tenant sends when reporting maintenance are the earliest sight of a problem. RapidEye reads them for what the tenant did not mention and what the same room looked like at the last inspection.
• Check-out. The photographs that decide the deposit. Each deduction arrives as a finding: the spot, the type of damage, how serious, both photos, and the tenancy dates that put the change inside this tenant's stay rather than the last one's.
• Vacant and between tenancies. A property sitting empty between lets picks up damp, a leak, a break-in nobody visits to notice. A short capture round returns a condition report for each one.

Each finding names the address, the spot, the type of problem, how serious it is, both photos and a suggested next step. It lands in the RapidEye dashboard and, if you want, a branch inbox or Slack channel. Whether that becomes a works order, a landlord email or a deposit claim stays a decision your property manager makes in Alto.

How to connect Alto to RapidEye

1. Your managed properties in Alto. Works orders and the Management tab only exist on lettings properties, not sales records, so the managed side of the book is what RapidEye reads. Live tenancies matter here: the tenancy is what puts dates either side of a change.
2. Photos from your visits. Alto's works order carries one image on the way out and has no field for the photos that come back, so RapidEye sends a capture link that opens on any phone with no app to install: a fixed set of angles per room, taken while the manager is already standing there. If your agency runs an inspection app already, RapidEye reads those reports instead.
3. Add RapidEye as a user. A Group Administrator creates the user in System Administration and ticks Property Management Enabled. The modal has the exact path.

How Alto handles inspections, works orders and condition

Checked against Alto's help centre, September 2026.

Alto is the sales and lettings CRM behind a large share of UK high-street agencies, and its lettings half runs on two objects: the tenancy, which carries the dates, and the works order, which carries the jobs. According to Alto's help centre documentation (altosoftware.co.uk), a works order "records an instruction to a supplier for maintenance or repair work that needs to be carried out on a property", can only be added to lettings properties through the Management tab of the property record, and is created with a supplier chosen first, preferred suppliers marked with a gold star. Here is what an agency fills in when raising one.

Every field on that form is about getting the work started. Once instructed, the works order moves through its statuses, from New Request to Supplier Instructed and on, and can be viewed by priority or by status on the dashboard widget, or cancelled by setting the status to Cancelled. Landlords and tenants can see the works orders you choose to share through the PropertyFile portal, where tenants also report issues in the first place.

Where the photo of the finished job goes

Nowhere in the works order. The single Upload File field is an outbound attachment, and Alto's help centre is explicit that the image is not sent to the supplier with the request. There is no matching field for the photographs that come back when the contractor says the job is done, which is exactly the half a landlord questions and an adjudicator asks for. In practice that evidence ends up in an email thread, on a phone, or in a PDF from another system, and the works order records that the status changed rather than that the work was done.

Does Alto have a property inspection app?

It schedules inspections rather than carrying them out, and it is honest about that. Alto's help centre describes scheduling property inspections from the tenancy, and lists a property inspection as one of the diary entry types alongside a survey, a safety check, a photo appointment and a meeting. On the Property Management Dashboard, the Event Dates widget shows what is due and colour codes it.

• Upcoming
• Overdue
• Property inspections
• Safety certificates
• Compliance checks
• Insurance renewals

The report itself is somebody else's job, and Alto says so by pointing at its marketplace. Its help centre documents an Inventory Base integration that imports Alto properties in real time and in bulk so clerks can capture property condition, photos and issues in that app and produce inventories, check-ins, check-outs, building inspections and risk assessments, and it documents comparable arrangements with TouchRight and KPR for inspection reports and habitation compliance. Those partners solve the capture problem well. What none of them, and none of Alto, is described as doing is reading the photos back and telling you what changed between two visits to the same address. A completed inspection report is still a person's account of a property, filed. That is the seat RapidEye takes, and it is the seat that matters in lettings, because at check-out the person writing the account and the person paying for the answer are not the same person.

Alto integration FAQ