Visit reports for home watch companies

The idea

Home watch is a real, accredited industry in Florida and Arizona: companies charge 40 to 80 USD per visit to check on snowbirds’ empty houses through hurricane and monsoon season. The entire value delivered to the absent owner is the report, and today that report is a text message with six photos, or a general-purpose inspection app whose output confuses a 70-year-old client in Michigan.

The wedge is treating the report as the product. A guided checklist keeps the inspector consistent, required geotagged photos make the visit provable (which matters for both liability and trust), and a clean branded PDF landing in the owner’s inbox minutes after the visit is what makes the client renew at 60 USD a visit without grumbling.

Who pays

The home watch company owner pays 49 USD/month flat. A modest operation doing 150 visits a month grosses 7 to 10k USD, and the report is their differentiation against the neighbour’s kid with a key; 49 USD is an easy yes, especially with NHWA accreditation pushing members towards professional documentation. Distribution: the NHWA member directory and conference, Florida home watch Facebook groups, and SEO on “home watch report template”, a term owners of these businesses genuinely search.

MVP scope

• Property profiles with access notes and owner contacts
• Editable checklist templates with photo-required items
• Mobile-first visit runner with pass/attention/fail states and camera capture
• Timestamp/GPS stamping on photos and enforced completion rules
• Auto-generated branded PDF via react-pdf, emailed to the owner and archived
• Skip for v1: scheduling/route planning, invoicing, multi-inspector permissions, owner login portal, native apps

Build WatchReport, a web app for home watch companies that turns property visits into branded PDF reports. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, Auth, Storage, RLS), react-pdf (@react-pdf/renderer) for server-side PDF generation. Magic-link auth.

Data model: Company (with logo upload and brand colour), Properties (address, owner name and email, gate/alarm notes, photo of the house), ChecklistTemplates, Visits.

Core flow: the inspector opens the app on their phone at the property and starts a visit against a template. Default template sections: exterior (roof, gutters, doors/windows), interior (leaks under sinks, ceilings, AC/thermostat reading, water heater), pests, pool/lanai, mail. Each item gets a pass/attention/fail state, optional note, and photos. Photos are captured through the browser camera input; on upload, stamp EXIF GPS and capture time into the visit record and overlay date/time on the image server-side. Certain items are marked photo-required in the template and the visit cannot complete without them.

On completion: generate a PDF with the company's logo and colour, property header, visit date/time, inspector name, per-item results with embedded photos, and a summary of attention/fail items on page one. Email it to the owner automatically via Supabase edge function + Resend, and store it on the property's history page.

Pages: today's visit list, visit runner (mobile-first), property CRUD, template editor, report history, settings/branding/billing.

Pricing: 49 USD/month flat, unlimited properties. 14-day trial.