Hotel and Motel Inspections
A hotel is a building that never gets a day off. Every guest room is a small dwelling with its own HVAC, bathroom and finishes, turning over constantly, and the wear rate reflects that. Assessing one means sampling rooms intelligently, then looking hard at the systems that serve all of them at once.
Inspections are led by Collin Nowak, CCPIA Certified Commercial Property Inspector (#3223) and TREC-licensed Professional Inspector (#20772), serving commercial clients across Texas since 2013.
Room sampling
As with multi-family, nobody inspects every room on a due-diligence timeline, so the proposal sets how many are inspected and how they’re chosen. A useful sample spreads across floors, room types, wings, and any renovation phases — a property that’s been half-renovated is effectively two assets, and sampling only the refreshed side produces a flattering and misleading report.
The report names which rooms were entered. Rooms not entered are unknowns, and any property-wide conclusion drawn from a sample is an extrapolation, which we’ll say rather than imply.
Per-room HVAC
Most hotels condition rooms individually, commonly with PTAC units. Individually they’re inexpensive; across a whole property they represent a substantial capital item, and they tend to have been installed in batches, meaning they reach end of life in batches too.
We record condition and evidence of age across the sampled rooms, along with condensate handling and the wall sleeve and exterior grille condition — the latter being a common source of water intrusion into the room below or beside it.
Domestic hot water and plumbing
Hot water demand in a hotel peaks hard and narrow — a full house all showering inside the same two hours. Central plant condition, capacity indicators, recirculation, and evidence of chronic leakage get attention, along with in-room fixtures, supply and waste in sampled rooms.
Thermal imaging is included, and in a hotel it’s particularly useful for finding moisture tracking between rooms and floors, where a leak in one bathroom shows up in a ceiling two rooms away.
Guest life safety
This carries more weight in a hotel than almost anywhere, because the occupants are asleep and unfamiliar with the building. Corridor and stair egress, exit signage and emergency lighting, door closers and self-closing devices, smoke alarm presence in sampled rooms, extinguishers, and sprinkler coverage where present are all observed and reported.
Fire alarm and suppression systems are certified by licensed specialists in that trade. An inspection reports observed condition and will tell you where certification is a separate document you need to obtain.
Exterior walkways, stairs and balconies
On exterior-corridor motel formats these are life-safety structures and get the same attention they receive on a garden-style multi-family property: guardrail attachment and height, deck-to-wall junctions and water intrusion, stair treads and stringers, and corrosion or rot at bearing points. Much of the structure is concealed, and where observations raise a structural question the right answer is a structural engineer, not a longer paragraph in an inspection report.
Back of house and amenities
Laundry equipment and the rooms housing it — including dryer exhaust, which is both a fire risk and a chronically neglected item in high-volume laundries. Commercial kitchens where present are assessed as commercial kitchens, hood and all. Lobby, meeting rooms, fitness spaces, and pool or spa areas, with pool and spa inspection available as an add-on.
Roof, envelope and site
Roof coverings, flashings, drainage and penetrations, flown under an FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate where walking isn’t safe or practical. Exterior cladding, sealants, windows and doors. Parking, site drainage, exterior lighting and signage.
What sits outside the scope
Visual and non-invasive, and not a compliance certification. Environmental assessment, code compliance certification, ADA audits, and certification of elevators, fire alarm and fire suppression are separate exercises requiring different qualifications. Elevators in particular are excluded from every property inspection and are certified separately. Detail is on our commercial inspection FAQ.
Who orders a hotel inspection
Buyers and investors during due diligence, lenders as a financing condition, and owners planning a renovation cycle or a brand-mandated property improvement plan. On an operating property, room access has to be coordinated with the front desk around occupancy, and that scheduling is worth arranging early — it’s usually the constraint on how good a sample you get.
Scope, sample size, fee and delivery date are stated in the proposal before work begins. The process is on our commercial inspections page, with scope detail on commercial inspection services.