The handover inspection was scheduled for March 9, 2024, and the outgoing tenant at a Midway industrial space on University Avenue had already vacated. My client, the property manager, had one requirement: photographic proof the floor was clean before the keys changed hands. The previous occupant had run a vehicle shop for six years, and the concrete was a mosaic of oil stains, hydraulic fluid rings, and salt-drag tracks from Minnesota winters. Documenting that floor before and after a degrease took a full day in two sessions and settled a deposit dispute without a single phone call.
What the floor looked like before the crew arrived
I shot the floor before the cleaning crew touched anything, which is the rule I never break on lease handovers. Walk-in footage first, every time. The space was roughly 8,400 square feet of 5-inch slab with two floor drains and a loading dock ramp at the east end. My first pass was a slow walk along the long axis at about 3 feet per second, camera at hip height, sweeping side to side. That gives a continuous record of the whole floor in one unbroken clip.
After the walk, I shot a grid of stills: one frame every 10 feet along each aisle, camera pointed straight down, a white balance card and a small color reference chart on the floor in each frame. Color references sound excessive until you need to explain to a judge why a stain appears in one photo but not another. Concrete under warm shop lighting looks different from concrete under daylight, and a chart in every frame kills that argument before it starts.
For the staining, I flagged the eight worst zones with numbered cards and shot a close-up set: one wide, one tight at 50mm, and a 6-inch ruler for scale. The oil beneath the main service bay had soaked in deep enough that the surface felt tacky, which I noted on the audio track of the walk-through video. The drain covers had rust scale built up around the lip. The dock ramp showed salt hazing from three winter seasons.
Camera setup for a large interior floor
Warehouse floors are hard to photograph evenly because overhead lighting is uneven by design. I do not fight this by adding lights; instead I shoot at a fixed exposure that holds mid-tone detail and let the edges go a stop darker, noting in the metadata that exposure was not corrected. Consistent beats pretty for documentation.
Settings: 24mm lens, f/5.6, ISO 800, 1/60 s, white balance matched to the dominant fixture — here 4,100 K LED. Manual mode, never touched between positions. Variation across a lease-handover still set looks like post-processing, and post-processing looks like tampering.
Shooting the after while the floor was still wet
I was back at the space four hours after the degreasing team finished their hot-water pressure treatment. The floor was damp. That was intentional. Wet concrete shows residual contamination more clearly than dry concrete, because oil that survived the process comes to the surface as the water evaporates. I shot the same grid at the same exposure with the same white balance card, and re-flagged the same eight numbered positions with the same cards.
Six of the eight positions were clean to the camera. One showed faint ghosting that dried out of view by the following morning, which I documented with a return visit. One — the area directly under the main service bay lift — retained a visible ring. I photographed that in detail, including a tape measure across it: 29 inches, centered on the original drain location. That ring became the subject of the deposit negotiation.
What the record resolved and what it did not
The property manager and tenant agreed the lift-bay stain was pre-existing in part and new in part. The footage did not decide responsibility. What it did was eliminate every other disputed zone. Without documentation, eight stains would have been argued. With it, one was. That reduction in scope — from eight problems to one — is what the footage delivered.
The degreasing on 8,400 square feet with heavy contamination ran between $2,200 and $3,100 — the range I have seen for similar work in the Twin Cities. For deep oil contamination on a commercial slab, a Saint Paul industrial cleaning crew familiar with Minnesota slab conditions and winter salt damage will approach it differently than a general janitorial service.
Frequently asked questions
Should I photograph a warehouse floor before or after the degreasing? Both, in the same positions. The before set establishes what contamination was present at lease-end. The after set proves what the cleaning addressed. Shooting only the after leaves no way to verify that staining found later was not introduced between the cleaning and the next inspection.
What camera settings work best for documenting warehouse floors? Manual exposure set once and held throughout: f/5.6 to f/8, ISO 400 to 800 depending on fixture brightness, 1/60 s minimum to avoid flicker from fluorescent or LED cycling. A white balance card in each frame and a color reference chart in the first and last frame of the set protects against disputes about color rendering.
How long should I keep lease-handover documentation? Keep it for the full duration of any deposit dispute period, which varies by state. In Minnesota, commercial lease terms typically allow a landlord to retain documentation for the deposit claim period defined in the lease, often 60 to 90 days. Realistically, keep everything until any possible claim is time-barred under your lease agreement.