Lowcountry AI WorkshopAI can sort a forty-page inspection report into categories, quote what the inspector actually wrote, and give you the page number for every item — in about ninety seconds. It cannot tell you what a repair costs, how serious a finding is, whether something violates code, or what you should ask the seller for. The line between those two lists is sharp, and staying on the right side of it is the whole skill.
Here is what each side looks like in practice.
The situation this actually solves
The report lands at 8pm. Your buyer is anxious and has already read the summary page, which uses the word “deficient” eleven times. Your due diligence period is ticking. Reading forty pages properly is an hour you do not have tonight, so you skim it — and skimming is the genuinely risky part, because the thing that bites you later is always in the section you scrolled past.
That is the problem worth solving. Not writing the repair request. Reading the document at full attention when you do not have the attention to spare.
What it does well
Sorting by category
The prompt I use, more or less verbatim:
Read the inspection report in this folder. Sort every finding into three groups: safety or structural, material defects worth negotiating, and normal wear for a home of this age. For each item in the first two groups, quote what the inspector actually wrote and give me the page number. Do not estimate repair costs. Do not characterise severity beyond the inspector’s own words.
Two instructions in there are doing the heavy lifting. “Quote what the inspector actually wrote” stops it paraphrasing, which is where meaning drifts. “Give me the page number” makes the whole output checkable in seconds rather than requiring you to re-read to verify.
Finding the things you skim past
Inspectors do not rank findings by consequence. A note about a missing GFCI outlet and a note about active moisture intrusion at a foundation wall get the same typographical weight and the same two-line paragraph. A machine reading every line with equal care catches the second one. A tired human at 8pm reliably does not.
Cross-referencing against your dates
Ask it to list which items would require a specialist evaluation, and how many business days are left in your due diligence period. That is an arithmetic and lookup problem, which it is good at — and it is the question that determines whether you need to order a structural engineer tomorrow morning or you have a week.
Producing a first draft of the repair request
Once you have decided what to ask for, having it draft the request using the inspector’s own language is genuinely faster. Note the order: you decide, it drafts. Not the other way around.
What it cannot do — and will confidently pretend it can
Estimate repair costs
This is the one that will hurt you. Ask what it costs to replace a twenty-year-old HVAC system in Charleston and you will get a confident number with a plausible range. It has no access to local labour rates, no idea what the crawlspace access is like, and no knowledge of what your three usual vendors are quoting this month. It is producing a nationally averaged guess dressed as a local estimate.
And the moment you relay that number to your client, you have made a representation. Not the software — you. Get quotes from actual vendors. That is what vendors are for, and it is also why an agent’s contractor relationships are worth something in a way that software is not going to replace.
Judge severity
“Is this crack serious?” is a question that requires seeing the crack, knowing the soil, and knowing whether it has moved. The report says what the inspector observed. A model reading that text can tell you what was written. It cannot tell you what it means, and if you ask, it will produce something that sounds like an assessment.
Rule on code compliance
Building codes vary by jurisdiction and by the year the house was permitted. What is grandfathered in a 1978 house on James Island is not the same as what is required in new construction in Nexton. Anything a general-purpose model tells you about code should be treated as a prompt to go and check, never as an answer.
Tell you what to negotiate
What to ask for is a strategy question that depends on your market, your buyer’s leverage, how the seller has behaved so far, and what you know about the listing agent. None of that is in the PDF. This is the part of the job that is actually yours.
Read handwriting or bad scans reliably
Modern tools handle clean digital PDFs very well. A phone photograph of a printed page at an angle, or a scanned report with handwritten annotations in the margin, is where quiet errors get introduced. If the source document is poor quality, verify harder — or do not use it.
Free guide
The longer version of this is in The Real Estate Agent’s Guide to Claude & Cowork — 26 pages, written for South Carolina agents, with twenty-six prompts you can copy and use. No charge. Download it here.
The South Carolina wrinkle
Two things worth naming for agents practising here.
Your contract’s inspection or due diligence structure determines everything about timing. Read the executed contract rather than assuming, and be specific with the tool about what your deadline actually is. If you tell it the date, it can do the arithmetic. If you let it assume, it will assume something generic and you will not notice.
Do not let it characterise what is or is not a required disclosure. South Carolina’s disclosure obligations sit with the seller and are a legal question, not a document-summarisation question. If a finding raises a disclosure issue, that is a call to your broker-in-charge, not a prompt.
The verification habit
Everything above only works with one discipline attached: you check every quoted item against the page it cites, before it reaches your client.
With page numbers in the output this takes three or four minutes for a long report. That is not overhead — it is the whole reason to demand citations in the prompt in the first place. An output you cannot check quickly is an output you should not use.
Done this way, the sequence is: ninety seconds of machine reading, four minutes of spot-checking, then twenty minutes of you reading the sections that matter at full attention. Versus one hour of skimming everything badly. That is the actual trade, and it is a good one.
If you want to practise this on a real file
This is one of the exercises I run in the workshop, on a sample inspection report, with everybody working in their own account. The next public session is the three-hour class at the Charleston Digital Corridor on October 15, at an introductory $99 — sample files rather than your own, no follow-up. Details on the pricing page.
If you would rather start on your own, the free 26-page guide covers the prompt above, the verification loop, and the data-handling rules that go with it. Download it here.
Barry Cunningham runs Lowcountry AI Workshop and holds a South Carolina real estate license. This post is education, not legal advice, and nothing here replaces your broker-in-charge’s policy or a licensed inspector’s or contractor’s opinion.