AI condition review for VTS

Overview

VTS knows your buildings, your spaces and your tenants precisely; the condition of those spaces arrives one walk at a time. VTS Activate is where the operational half lives: a work orders module with service requests, equipment, preventive maintenance and digital inspections, all tied to the properties and tenant companies the platform already tracks. Inspections capture a photo per line item, and a photo is mandatory wherever an inspector marks something deficient, so the evidence is genuinely there. RapidEye reads that evidence at portfolio scale and returns a finding per issue, filed against the same building and space.

How it works with VTS Activate

Activate's work orders module already puts photos in specific places, each attached to a property, a space or a piece of equipment. The checks follow those places rather than inventing new ones.

• Digital inspection items. An engineer walks the template on the mobile app answering each line, adding a photo from the camera gallery as they go. RapidEye reads those images against the item they were filed under, so a lobby ceiling tile shows up as that item on that walk in that building.
• Deficient items. Activate makes a note and a photo mandatory here, which produces the cleanest evidence in the whole platform. RapidEye grades severity from the image itself, so a hundred deficiencies across a portfolio arrive ranked rather than alphabetical.
• Service requests. Requests come in from tenants and staff through the Activate app and accept attachments, including pictures, on the original submission and afterwards. RapidEye reads what the tenant sent and what the engineer sent back, and says whether the second one resolves the first.
• Equipment and preventive maintenance. An equipment profile carries attachments and a history of scheduled tasks and related requests. Photographed on a recurring schedule, one rooftop unit becomes a series, and the visit where it started to look different is the one that surfaces.
• Tenant space at turnover. When a suite hands back, the condition argument is settled by what was photographed. VTS knows the tenancy and the space; RapidEye reads the before and after and says what changed between them.

A finding names the building, the space, where in the photo the problem sits, what kind it is (damage, missed cleaning, a missing item, or a maintenance issue), how serious it is, the photos on either side of it, and a suggested next step. Findings live in the RapidEye dashboard and can be forwarded to the property team by Slack or email. Photos are only the default input: video walkthroughs, 3D scans and an inspection format your own engineers designed are all things we read, so an input not named here is a conversation rather than a no.

How to connect VTS to RapidEye

1. Your properties, as VTS already has them. Buildings, floors, units and tenant companies live in Activate, and that structure is what a finding is filed against. Nothing new to map.
2. A source of photos. Digital inspections, service requests and equipment records already take them. Where a vendor visit or a routine walk is not photographed today, RapidEye sends a capture link that opens on any phone, no app to install.
3. An invite from User Management. Invite RapidEye as a user and add it to a team, since Activate applies permissions by team membership. The Connect VTS panel has the details.

How a VTS Activate inspection is built

Checked against the VTS Activate help centre, September 2026.

Digital Inspections is the newest part of the work orders module and the most interesting one for anyone who cares about condition. According to the VTS Activate help centre documentation (vtsactivate.zendesk.com), inspections are configured on desktop and operated on mobile: an admin picks a template from the library, customizes it by deleting or reordering items to match the property, and the engineer runs it as a walkthrough. Four templates ship as starting points, an abbreviated and a comprehensive one each for office and industrial buildings, covering structure, envelope, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, life safety, ADA compliance and common areas.

Each item takes an answer, and optionally a photo, a note, or a work order created on the spot. Deficient is the one answer that forces both a note and a photo.

The handoff into work is the well-built part. Tapping Create Work Order on an item opens your organization's own work order form, and Activate pre-populates the description from the inspector's notes and attaches the photos captured during the inspection automatically, so nothing gets retyped and nothing gets lost between the walk and the queue. Once the walk is finished, the inspection is complete and cannot be changed or edited, and the dashboard holds the completed record with a downloadable PDF report giving a line-by-line breakdown.

What the inspection record cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether the answers are right. That is not a shortcoming of the tool; no checklist product anywhere can grade its own answers, because the checklist is a record of what a person said, and the photo is the only part of it that is a record of what was there. Activate is unusually strict where it can be, forcing a note and a photo on every deficient item, but an item marked OK carries no such requirement, and an item marked N/A carries no evidence at all. On a comprehensive office template that is most of the walk. The other limit is scale: a completed inspection produces a PDF, and PDFs are read one at a time by whoever asked for that one. Nobody reads forty of them across a portfolio looking for the tile that has been wet in three consecutive quarters. Reading all of them, and comparing this quarter's photo of a space against the last one, is what RapidEye adds on top of a record VTS already captures well.

VTS integration FAQ