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Home Warranties

Here are the 4 reasons you should not renew or even get a home warranty:

  1. Home Warranties don’t cover 95% of the issues that occur. That’s right. Home Warranties will show you the fine print just before they throw you under the bus. In the last decade, we have never ever never had a home warranty replace an HVAC unit. Ever. In a best case scenario, they will patch up that unit and you can squeeze another 4 months AFTER they charge you for parts and labor. After you have spent hundreds of dollars putting bandaids on that dying HVAC unit, you will end up buying a new one anyway.  Every single one of our owners cancelled their policy after they dealt with an HVAC warranty.
  2. Home Warranties will piss off your tenants every single time.  We have never had a technician respond to a tenant within 6 hours. The average response to a broken Air Conditioner is 48 hours. Every year, we lose a tenant because a home warranty dilly dallied. By the time they tell you your AC isn’t covered, a week has gone by. You have no idea how hostile tenants get when it’s 110 degrees and their AC has been out for a week. The most frustrating thing for us is that the tenants put the blame on us. We get negative reviews because of these stupid home warranties. Grrrrr.
  3. Home Warranties will create more damage because they don’t jump to the scene.  About every 10th warranty issue caused more damage to the property because they took 2 days to get to the problem. This happens frequently with plumbing leaks. In one case, the lack of response created 3 times the cost of repair because of sheet rock damage.
  4. Home Warranties usually end up costing you more after all is said and done.  Most warranty companies will charge $75 per trade call. In many cases a maintenance event requires multiple trades with multiple visits. Those add up and we have found that if we had just sent out an handyman, the cost would have been less.

Starting 5/1/2019 we are implementing new procedures in an effort to retain tenants who get hit with a major repair that has a home warranty in place. Tenants will contact warranty companies directly so we have fewer people involved and tenants can vent their frustration at the company and not at you or us.

If a home warranty doesn’t respond with a technician within 48 hours, we will take care of it. You can try to chase down compensation from the home warranty.

All owners with warranties will need to do these things:

  1. Contact the warranty company and provide permission for their tenant to contact the warranty company directly. Your property manager will provide that to you.
  2. To mitigate delays in the repair, you will provide the home warranty company a credit card to have on file for the trade fee. Typical trade fees are $75 bur yours may be different. Tenants will pay the deductible indicated in their lease. In most cases, that tenant deductible is $40.

We know this is a hassle for you but we believe that being proactive in this effort, we can keep all our tenants.

Procedures for tenants are shown here. These procedures will be added to our leases. All our tenants with warranties will be sent an addendum that explains their responsibilities and consequences of randomly calling in repairs.