Abstract: The invention is a method and apparatus containing virtual processing components to calculate the potential economic savings from conducting an inspection to make an “informed” maintenance decision as to the actual state of a building component, rather than projecting the cost based on historical inspection data and making an “uninformed” decision. The invention produces a Value of Inspection (VOI) index for each proposed future inspection which may be compared to a threshold (such as the cost of inspections) to determine if an inspection is warranted. The time at which an inspection is performed can also be optimized by comparing VOI's for multiple proposed inspection dates.