How to Make a Home Inventory for Insurance

What a home inventory is, and what it is not

A home inventory is a documented record of the personal property inside your home: furniture, electronics, clothing, kitchenware, tools, art, jewelry, and so on. Most policies treat these as "contents" or "personal property," distinct from the structure of the house itself.

An inventory is not a claim. It is not a coverage decision. It does not bind the insurer to any particular payout. What it does is provide one side of the conversation that follows a loss: a list of what existed, with descriptions, estimated values, and ideally visual or documentary evidence.

The more specific the inventory, the more useful it tends to be in the documentation process. A line item that says "sofa, $1,200" is less useful than one that says "3-seat sectional sofa, gray fabric, West Elm Andes model, purchased March 2022, $1,799," with a photo attached.

How to create a home inventory, step by step

Triple-I (the Insurance Information Institute) describes a simple sequence that works whether you use paper, a spreadsheet, or an app. A phone camera is enough to start.

Step 1: Start small. Pick one contained area, such as a kitchen cabinet or a closet, or begin with recent purchases while the details are fresh. Then work through the home one room at a time.

Step 2: Record the basics for each item: what it is, the make and model, where you bought it, roughly when, and what you paid. Clothing can be counted by category, for example "5 pairs of jeans, 3 pairs of sneakers."

Step 3: Photograph or film as you go. Capture each room as a whole, then open closets, cabinets, and drawers. Triple-I suggests walking through each room with a video camera and describing the contents out loud.

Step 4: Note serial numbers for electronics and major appliances. They are usually on the back or bottom. Keep receipts, purchase contracts, and appraisals with the list.

Step 5: Include the places that are easy to skip: the garage, attic, basement, sheds, and anything kept off-site, such as in a self-storage unit.

Step 6: Flag high-value items such as jewelry, art, and collectibles, and ask your agent whether they need separate coverage.

Step 7: Store a copy outside the home and keep it current by adding new purchases as you make them. If you stall partway, keep what you have: Triple-I's advice is that an incomplete inventory is better than none.

The room-by-room method

The most common approach is room by room. Work through one room at a time so nothing is missed and the inventory has a natural structure. A typical pass covers: living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, home office, garage, basement, attic, and any outdoor or outbuilding storage.

Inside each room, the standard fields per item are: a short description, brand or model where applicable, approximate purchase date, approximate value, and any serial or identifying numbers for electronics, appliances, firearms, or jewelry. Photos help. Receipts help more.

Higher-value categories (jewelry, firearms, art, electronics) often have sub-limits in homeowner policies. These are caps on how much the policy will pay out for that category regardless of the total contents limit. Inventorying these categories carefully (with appraisals where relevant) is one of the more meaningful pieces of preparation.

Why video-based inventory has become standard

Until recently, the practical choice was a spreadsheet plus photos. The work involved is significant: most homeowners start, stop, and never finish. A 2023 Triple-I / Munich Re consumer survey found 47% of homeowners said they had prepared an inventory of their possessions.

Video walkthrough methods change the time cost dramatically. A 60-second sweep of a room captures hundreds of items at once, with their positions, brands, condition, and surrounding context. The bottleneck moves from data entry to analysis.

AI-assisted inventory tools, Preloss among them, pick up that bottleneck. Frames from the walkthrough video are processed by computer vision models that identify visible objects, surface brand and model information where readable, and organize the results into a room-by-room list with estimated replacement-value ranges. The homeowner reviews and adjusts; the system handles the tedious part.

The output is the same kind of document the spreadsheet method produces (a list with descriptions, values, and visual evidence), but with the labor profile inverted. Most users report a full-home walkthrough takes 10–20 minutes total.

What goes in the export

Whatever method is used to build the inventory, the useful output is typically: a PDF listing of items with descriptions and estimated values; the underlying photos or video frames; any receipts or serial-number captures attached to individual items; and a timestamp indicating when the documentation was created.

The timestamp matters. An inventory created the week after a loss tells a different story than one created two years before it. Preloss anchors a cryptographic hash of each export to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps, which gives an independently verifiable record that the documentation existed at a specific point in time.

Storing the inventory so you actually have it later

An inventory that lives on a device inside the house is an inventory that may be lost in the same event that destroys the house. The standard practice is to keep at least one copy off-site or in cloud storage. Email a copy to yourself. Save it to a cloud drive. Give a copy to a trusted family member outside the area.

If the inventory is digital and includes the underlying video or photos, that storage may be larger than a typical document. Plan accordingly. Apps that handle the inventory natively typically handle storage and backup for you.