Be Winter Ready…
The month of October brings the cooler weather, warm cozy sweaters and the dreaded winter months. If you’re anything like us, you also think about what you need to do to get your own personal residence ready for winter. But what about your rental properties?
As a real estate investor, we know preventative maintenance is important to you, however sometimes there just isn’t enough hours in the day to complete all of those tasks.
One of those things is ensuring your property is winter ready. Whether you do it yourself or you hire someone, I highly recommend you ensure your property is Winter Ready.
That’s why at Welcome Home we ensure all of our clients homes are ready for the winter months. As well, recently, we launched a subscription based service for self-managing landlords as well.
HOW WE STARTED
We started this program a few years ago when one of our own tenants called us about a water issue in her basement. We were mortified. We thought for sure it was a foundation issue and all we could see is dollar signs. But the fix was really simple. Our eavestroughs were full of leaves and the downspouts were directed towards the house and were seeping into the block foundation. The solution, clean them out and direct the water away from the house.
Since then, we haven’t missed a spring or a fall in doing this preventative maintenance on any of our rentals. Recently other investors have asked us if we wold be able to arrange that for other rentals we have — and now we are.
WHY YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE
If you’re anything like us, water tends to scare us. Water can be a costly expenditure and as an investor can wipe out your entire cash flow you’ve built up. A simple, preventative maintenance program like Spring/Winter Ready can save you thousands of dollars in the future. Take our example above, we thought we had a foundation issue that could’ve cost us upwards of $5,000 when the solutions was a simple fix.
Spring/Winter Ready is a small price to pay compared to the alternative and is a business expense that you can use to deduct on your taxes. So what are you waiting for? Are you going to get up on that ladder and do this, or should we?
So what is it I should be doing?
· Clean out all gutters, downspouts and eavestroughs from leaves & debris
· Direct water away from the home
· Turn off all outdoor water sources
· Test smoke detectors and C02 detectors as well as change batteries annually
These are small simple tasks that can save you a lot of headache and aggrevation in the long run, however you need to find the time to do it! If you need some help we’re only a phone call away. Take these important tasks off of your TO DO list and have confidence knowing that the job will get done.