Greetings and welcome to the first blog post about Home Watch from Spouses Watching Houses Tampa! The goal of this Home Watch blog is to provide insightful tips and information for our Home Watch customers that are away from home or possibly coming back to their vacation or 2nd home and are looking for recommendations from our knowledgebase gathered from all of our customers over time.
Scott & Joanna Johnson
While we do not proclaim to be great bloggers that will inspire a whirlwind of creative activity on your part. We can assure you that we do have many years of insight into all aspects of home ownership, maintenance, troubleshooting, rehab, repairs, upgrades, and your everyday home needs. We hope you, the homeowner, will gain something from our cumulative experiences that will help you cut to the chase so to speak in overcoming challenges, hurdles, and headaches. Homewatch or Home Watch, depending on how people refer to it, is all about keeping ahead of tasks before issues arise, though there’s never any accounting for Murphy and his silly law. When he comes around, which he will inevitably do, we are here to help.
The purpose of Home Watch is to keep the homeowner aware of the little things that need to be addressed, keep the home looking occupied and tidy so burglars and ne’er do wells don’t see an obvious target, and to make sure the home is functioning as it should for when the homeowner arrives to use it. While we also provide handyman services, light concierge, and other things the customers need, the basic concept is to make sure everything is okay…to be their eyes, ears, and in Florida, their noses (mold/mildew!) and assist with the things they would need to be here to accomplish. No customer is the same, no house is the same, and staying on top of the various alarm system types/brands, AC system consoles, window door types, fridge/appliance types, tankless water heaters etc all keep us constantly learning. We’ve seen so many different types of everything in a home…and so many homes and the way the various home owners use things, we can literally be a wealth of information. We don’t always have an answer…but any accredited member of the National Home Watch Association has over 150+ other Home Watch company owners to bounce ideas off of, ask questions to etc so this makes an accredited Home Watch company invaluable to the homeowner. We hope to provide lots of the tips we learn on this blog.
Simple for instance; we once had a customer who called 3-4 times a week with alarm system going off at all hours of the day, police came out, nothing going on, we showed up, nothing going on, this costs the homeowner when the police arrive for false alarms after the 1st false report. The home owner asked us to go out and see if we can figure out what is going on. We went out and started going from sensor to sensor to see if there was a bad battery or a short (all wireless units) and after about the 8th sensor, we found a that in one of the big motion sensor units about the size of a half a soda can…a gecko had made a little home inside it and that little guy was triggering the alarm! The homeowner was at his full time residence in Birmingham, Alabama and the 2 hours it took us to go out and troubleshoot saved him the cost of travelling down to try to figure it out himself. I can only imagine the amount of lost sleep on their part…yet our service and intimate knowledge of his home and how all these things work helped us help him.
We want to pass this sort of thing on to you, if we can. 🙂