The Briefing Room
Most owners use one of these. The ones who sleep well use all three. Here is what each actually does.
An empty house faces three kinds of trouble: things that happen to it from outside (weather, intruders, a tree), things that happen inside it on their own (heat, water, pests, systems), and things that happen because nobody is there (deliveries piling up, a contractor who never showed, a seasonal task that got missed). Each of the three approaches below is good at one of these and weak on the others.
Anything visible from the road, often fast. A tree down, a door open, headlights in the driveway at 2 am. A neighbor who likes you is the best early warning on the outside of the house there is.
Almost everything inside. They are not going to run your faucets, open the attic hatch or smell the mechanical room, and you should not expect them to. They also go on vacation, get sick, and sell their house.
Obligation. Favors are hard to schedule, harder to hold to a standard, and awkward to end. And when something is missed, it costs a friendship as well as a repair.
Keep them. Tell them who we are so they recognize our vehicle. Give them our number. A neighbor and a steward together cover more than either alone.
Motion, doors opening, a temperature reading at the sensor, a leak at the puck under the water heater. Instantly, from anywhere, at low cost. We recommend them to every client.
Everything they are not pointed at, and everything that does not trip a threshold. A slow drip behind a wall, mice in the insulation, frost inside a window, a furnace that is running but struggling. They also depend on power and internet, which fail together in a North Idaho storm.
False confidence. A green dashboard feels like a checked house. It is a checked sensor.
As the alarm between visits. When a sensor goes off at 3 am, someone still has to go. On our plans, that someone is us.
The interior. The slow changes. The smells, sounds and stains that only a person inside notices, compared against the last visit and documented in photos.
The hours between visits. A pipe that bursts on Tuesday is found on the next scheduled day unless a sensor catches it first. That is the gap cameras and sensors are for.
Home Watch is $125 a month for exterior walkthroughs and $295 for interior and exterior, bi-weekly. The stewardship plans above it add weekly visits, maintenance hours and coordination.
As the backbone. The schedule you can count on, the record you can show, and the person who answers when the sensor or the neighbor calls.
A neighbor who watches the road, sensors that watch the mechanical room, and a steward who walks the whole house every week or two and responds to both. We help you set up the first two as part of onboarding, because they make the third one better.
Tell us what you have in place now. We will be honest about where the gaps are and which plan, if any, fills them.
Special Care Estates is operated by Specials Home Selling Team LLC. Walkthroughs are visual, non-invasive checks and are not a licensed home inspection.