People ask us this a lot, and it is a fair question. What do you actually do when you visit my house? The honest answer is that we do a lot, and we do it the same way every single time.
A Home Watch visit is a visual inspection of your home, looking for obvious issues, done on a schedule. That is the definition, and it is a good one, but it does not tell you what the visit looks like from the front door to the back fence. So here it is, step by step.
Outside first
We start outside, because the outside tells you things before you ever open the door. We pull the junk mail and flyers so the house does not look empty. We walk the yard, the roof line, the gutters, and the drainage. We check the doors and windows, the screens, the locks, and the garage. We look for storm damage, a fallen branch, a fence panel down, a broken window, or anything that suggests someone has been around who should not have been.
The outside matters because it is the first thing anyone sees. A house with a pile of mail, an overflowing gutter, and a yard that has not been touched in a month looks empty, and looking empty invites trouble. Keeping the outside tidy is part of keeping the house safe.
Inside, room by room
Inside, we check the security system, the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, the thermostat, and the humidity. Humidity matters more than most people think. A house that is too humid grows mold. A house that is too dry cracks wood and warps floors. We check the reading and we note it.
Then we go looking for water, because water is the enemy. We look under every sink. We run every faucet. We flush every toilet. We run the garbage disposal, cycle the dishwasher, and run the washer. We check the water heater, the visible pipes, the ceilings under the bathrooms, and the floors around the appliances. We look for the stain that was not there last time, the soft spot in the floor, the drip that just started.
We check the breaker box, the air filters, and the appliances. We look in the rooms nobody uses, the guest bedroom, the basement, the attic access, because those are the rooms where a leak can run for weeks before anyone notices.
Then you get the report
After every visit, we send you the report. Findings, observations, and photos from that visit, with GPS and time stamps, straight to you. Every single time. You can see what we saw, when we saw it, and what we did about it.
That report is the record of your home. If you ever need to show an insurer that the home was checked on a schedule, the reports are there. If you want to know whether that stain on the ceiling is new, you can compare last month's photos with this month's. The report is not a formality. It is the whole point of having someone walk through on a schedule.
Why the person doing the walk matters
Here is what makes the difference. The person doing that walk does not just do home watch. They work for a property management company that runs hundreds of homes across this state. They have seen a thousand water heaters, a thousand soft floors, a thousand small stains that turned into big bills. They know what they are looking at, and they know what to do next when they find something.
A checklist is only as good as the person holding it. Ours are held by people who run homes for a living.
Want the full checklist for your home? Message us and we will walk you through it. Request a walkthrough, email homewatch@4thdps.com, or call (336) 223-5337.