Home Maintenance Services, Home Maintenance Schedule
What Are Home Maintenance Services?
Organizations are beginning to spring up that are offering year round home maintenance services in exchange for a fee. These home maintenance services offer to keep your home in top shape and market worthy at all times by performing full inspections, usually on a quarterly basis, and making recommendations on work that needs completing.
What do a home maintenance services do?
Home maintenance services perform regularly scheduled inspections, usually every three months. Each time they come to your home they work from a checklist to complete a thorough inspection of your home from the foundation to the roof and everything in between. Depending on the level of service you purchase, they may leave you with a home maintenance kit that includes light bulbs, furnace filters and so on, or they may make these replacements for you as part of their service.
What home maintenance services do not do?
Usually home maintenance services will not make any recommended repairs themselves. To do so would be a conflict of interest. They cannot make good faith recommendations on work that needs doing if they stand to gain for themselves from the repair work. Instead they make recommendations on local service providers who can do the work for you. Of course if work needs to be done on your home you are always free to choose your own repair service or handyman. The home maintenance service is just to let you know the condition of your home, not to make any repairs.
How much do home maintenance services cost?
Plan prices vary by location. Some services tie their costs into the value of your home, charging you a percentage such as .75 percent of the value of your home. Other home maintenance services give you a flat fee that is dependent on what type of service you sign up for. There are some home maintenance services that will charge for a service call and an hourly rate. In general, if you subscribe to a home maintenance service, expect to pay anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 dollars per year. Before signing up you should do a comparison on what it is costing you currently to maintain your home. Perhaps you know that you will benefit from a reminder that certain repairs need to be made. It might be worth this amount of money to you for peace of mind, and a good night’s sleep, especially if you have an older home. Or perhaps you will decide that you would rather pay for an occasional home inspection on an as-needed basis rather than contract for regular home maintenance services.