Templates
Exterior elevated elements
Exterior elevated element inspection report templates for California's SB 721 and SB 326 — Health & Safety Code 17973 and Civil Code 5551 — with filled-in examples.
Exterior elevated elements — balconies, decks, porches, stairways, walkways and entry structures, in the statutes' own list — are the subject of California's two mandatory inspection regimes, popularly called SB 721 for apartment buildings and SB 326 for condominiums. The operative law is Health & Safety Code 17973 and Civil Code 5551 respectively, and these are not property condition assessments: they are statutory safety inspections, and the contents of the report are enumerated in the code rather than left to the assessor's format.
That makes them the rare document where completeness is checkable: the statute lists what the report must contain, and a report missing one of those elements is deficient on its face. Each template below follows the statutory order, and says which code section each section answers to.
2 templates in this section
SB 721 Exterior Elevated Element Report Template (HSC 17973)
A balcony inspection report template following the statutory contents of Health & Safety Code 17973 — SB 721, deadline moved by AB 2579 — with a filled-in example.
Template + worked example + .docx
Civil Code 5551 (SB 326) Balcony Inspection Report Template
What Civil Code 5551 — the statute behind SB 326 — asks a condominium balcony inspection report to contain: a template in statutory order, with a filled-in example.
Template + worked example + .docx
Which statute — and which template — you need
The routing question only arises once an element meets the statutory definition — designed for human occupancy or use, elevated more than six feet above ground level, relying in whole or in substantial part on wood or wood-based products for structural support. From there, ownership form decides which regime applies. An apartment building with three or more multifamily dwelling units falls under Health & Safety Code 17973, the SB 721 regime; a common interest development is expressly excluded from that section by § 17973(n), and a condominium project with three or more attached multifamily dwelling units falls under Civil Code 5551 instead — the SB 326 regime, which reaches the elements the association is obligated to maintain or repair. The two categories do not mirror each other exactly: common interest development is the broader term, and a CID that is not a condominium project — a planned development, say — sits outside both statutes. Pick the template for the statute and resist mixing them: who may inspect, how the sample is drawn, and whether the findings feed a reserve study all differ, and each page below lists the specific rules the other statute does not share.
One orientation note on the bill names: they are labels, not the law. The bills amend and re-amend the code sections while the section numbers stay put, so a summary keyed to a bill describes the law as it stood on one day. The code sections carry the current text, which is why every template here cites the code and treats the bill numbers as the names people know the requirements by.