Ep 004 - The Value of Home Maintenance

Welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, where you'll discover strategies to save money, save time, and be better organized in managing your largest financial asset and biggest expense, your home. Your hosts, John Bodrozic and Beth Dodson, who are co-founders of HomeZada, have been supporting homeowners for over 20 years. They are here to share with you their tips and suggestions, as well as interviews with industry experts, with the goal of helping you become a smarter homeowner. Now, here's your hosts, Jon and Beth.

Welcome to another episode of Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. Today, we're really excited about a topic that we get asked often from our customers, and it's all about home maintenance. And the diversity of all the different things that we as homeowners need to do to maintain our home. We're excited about talking about all the problems that happen when we don't do preventative maintenance, the value of what we can save and improve the value of our home when we do home maintenance. Should we do it ourselves? Should we hire contractors? The seasonality of it. It's such a huge issue. It's one of the most popular topics that we talk about here at HomeZada. And Beth, why don't you kick us off by maybe giving us a high-level definition of what you consider home maintenance?

So to me, home maintenance is a lot of different tasks that you need to do to care for your home. One of the task areas is focused on outside your home. For those people who live in a suburban home or a single-family home, they have outside tasks they have to do. They have to check windows, they have to check doors if there's drafts, they have to check if there's some problems with their yard work, or maybe they just want to freshen up their yard work. They also have to check things inside their house. And there's a lot of equipment and there's a lot of appliances that we have that require tasks for them to operate properly. And in addition to that, just standard care of the house when it comes to managing areas of the home, meaning we have to look at windows again from the inside to make sure there's no drafts coming in. We have to take a look at ventilation and what do we need to do to make sure that everything is moving properly through our systems. And to me, that's really important. So it is a lot of tasks. Some may refer to it as the honey-do list, and a lot of men are not always happy about that because they seem to be the ones to get these tasks, but it is very important. Now, from— I just told you a little bit about what I define as maintenance. And if you've got anything to add, Jon, I'd love to hear it. But I'd also love to hear what problems we face when we do not perform maintenance.

Yeah.

I think the definition of maintenance that I'd like to add, it goes back to one of our previous episodes. When I think about a home, it's not just maintaining the home, it's maintaining all the collection of different building materials. Equipment, appliances, outdoor landscaping, all the things. These are all sort of individual components that all get put together to essentially compile your house. And a lot of these things are the things that need maintenance. And it's the concept that if you don't do the maintenance, then lots of problems end up occurring. And to kick us off on, you know, going through the list of problems that we as homeowners face and are frustrated with when we don't do maintenance is— Our energy and utility bills go up, right? When you think about your home, right, you've got the heating and the cooling and the hot water and the temperature inside the home. You know, when it's winter, it's cold outside. When it's summer, it's, you know, hot outside. And we want to sort of maintain a nice, comfortable life inside the home. And if the hot air inside the home is escaping or the cold air is escaping or your equipment is not operating efficiently, Your energy bills are going to be significantly higher than they need to be, which means the cost for you to own your home and manage that home is much higher than it could be. Elizabeth, why don't you tell us some other problems that you see in talking to customers who share their stories about what happens when they don't do maintenance?

Yeah, we see a lot of different things when people are not doing maintenance. One of the things we also hear is that the health of the family is impacted. When you are not changing air filters, then the risk is your family could have respiratory issues. And that's really important, even specifically during the cold weather months, because let's face it, colds, flus, etc., they do show up and we need to make sure that we can have clean air. The other thing that we also see, which is also very important, And it relates to health is safety. Making sure your smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors are operating properly because they could actually actually do damage to the home, but also they could be a life or death situation for us as humans. And we want to make sure that we're not we're preventing that from happening by changing and checking on them by changing the batteries and checking on them. The next thing. That I see as well when it relates to safety is fires can easily start within a home if you're not caring for specific equipment or you're not using things properly. And a lot of people may think that burning a candle is something as simple that can start a fire, but if you're not cleaning out your stove ventilation hood, then that could actually prevent— that could actually start a fire, and simply cleaning it can prevent that fire from occurring. And that's actually a number one thing happens during the holiday season because people are so excited to cook for their families and they're cooking a lot of food for their families that they're not considering cleaning everything that they have in their stove fume hood. So we wanna make sure that people stay healthy and safe, and maintenance tasks can actually help with that.

Absolutely. And it's the cascading effect of the ventilation hood, right? It's the— it builds up that small little film of grease.

Yep.

Right. And you don't really know it. And until you clean it, you don't realize how greasy your hood is above your stove. Then you start cooking something new, something flame sort of kicks up on what you're— and then it basically catches that hood on fire and then it cascades into next to your hood or all your wood cabinets. And then those things catch on fire. Right. And then it gets into the, do you have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen?

Right.

Or don't you? Or don't you? Right. And did you check? Did you check the pressure? Did you clean the hood, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, it's all the things about what can I do to prevent a fire? And then, if one were to start, how quickly can you put it out before it becomes a much bigger issue and you and your family have to leave the home? And there's so many stories that we hear, you know, both from, you know, our friends, our family, our customers. I recall a story that you were telling me about, again, the cascading effect of somebody had a tile roof They had a specific kind of tree that dropped berries on top of the, on top of the roof, and it clogged certain channels of the roof. A big heavy rain came and basically water was settling on the roof. The guy tried to make a claim on his insurance company to fix it, and they basically said, no, we're not going to pay for it because you didn't properly clean your roof.

Correct. This is a maintenance issue. It's not an insurance issue. It's someone didn't trim back the trees, which is really important, not only for roof damage, but for any other type of damage. Most people don't realize this in the in some parts of the country, high winds come in the winter, and those branches can come in and break windows, which then goes back to John's aspect of cascading effect. Then you've got all this rain coming in. Then you've got damage to your home, then you can potentially get mold. I mean, it's a scaling and cascading effect, as John said, to— if you're not doing one thing, it could cause even bigger problems, which not only is what we talked about for safety and health, but also the increased amount of budget you need to repair your home in those situations is astronomical.

Yeah. Correct. And it goes to the— what I like to tell people is maintenance really falls into 2 buckets, right? One is the things that I call preventative maintenance. It's those small little 10, 20, 30-minute tasks that you need to do once, twice, 3 or 4 times a year. And if you do those preventative maintenance tasks, then all those downstream cascading effects get minimized.

Yes.

But let's face it, right? There are things that are going to break, right? The flapper in your toilet's gonna wear out and it's running water, so you gotta fix the toilet. Maybe you get, you know, some damage, uh, on a storm in your gutter and you need to, you know, fix your downspouts. So maintenance does have that aspect of small fix-it and repair tasks, right? It's the small little things that we need to fix as we go along. And it, you know, it— those are the things that we still need to track, um, because those things tend to have some costs associated with it. Maybe you have to go to the home improvement store and buy some materials.

Mm-hmm.

Maybe you're hiring a service provider to clean your gutters. Whatever the case may be, tracking those costs over time starts to give you the insight as a homeowner of what is it costing me to maintain my home, both on the small preventative maintenance tasks that we do, as well as the fix-it and repair tasks. One other aspect I'd like to ask you about, Beth, is the concept about maintenance and the value of your home. Right. It's the— you're in your current home and let's say you start to neglect all these preventative maintenance tasks and then you get a job promotion across the country and it's time to move and it's time to sell your house. How is the fact that you haven't kept up with maintenance going to affect you when you're trying to sell your house?

This is a big, a big issue. I mean, a lot of times you have to consider market conditions when you're selling a home and that's one area. But if you are not caring for your home, And your inspection report comes back, and it's indicating that you're not. There's more damage that could be happening to your home that is not physically visible, and that's really important for you to take care of all of this ongoing. Because if that inspection report comes back, you can actually lose value in the sale price of your home because people want you to drop the price so that the new home buyer can actually. Manage all of those projects and get those done before they move in, or you are required to spend the money to perform those tasks before— or those repairs before the new homebuyer comes in. So all of a sudden you've seen increased cost, lower potential value on the sale of your home. Additionally, if you are not caring for your home, let's face it, the value of your home is just going to diminish anyway. Because a well-cared-for home is more valuable to any buyer. It's something that they don't have to worry about. It's something that they can come in and say, okay, I see that you've had strong records of strong home maintenance. I actually may pay more for your home because I know you've taken care of it. In fact, I know somebody who was trying to sell their home years ago. And somebody wanted it so desperately, and there was a lot of people bidding for this home, and they wanted to specifically live in this neighborhood. They loved it. But what ended up happening was they did the inspection and the gutters weren't clean, and they said, "We're going to bow out of the process." And that my friend who was going through this, they had their own issue because they had to move across country and they needed to sell this house. In order to do that. So it delayed the process in selling the home as well, which was a different issue, but it's still important because for a lot of people, time is money.

Absolutely. And when— a few things I'd like to add, again, going back to your home is a collection of building materials. What most people don't realize is when your home was originally built, all of those building materials and equipment, they have essentially what's called a— what I call a natural useful life.

Yes.

Right? You may get a style of roof that's going to last 20 to 30 years, and you may get a hot water heater that's gonna last 10 to 15 years, or windows that are gonna last a certain period of time. These materials are not really designed to last forever, right?

Correct.

But it's the, if you don't drain your hot water heater every year, which most people don't even realize you should do, right? It's possible that the useful life of your water heater is not gonna make it to 15 years.

Yeah.

It's going to burn out in 3 or 4 or 5 years. So, essentially, you're increasing your replacement costs of these building materials because you're neglecting those small 30-minute tasks once a year. And, you're going to hit with what I call the money pit, right? People are like, oh my God, my house is such a money pit and it costs me so much to maintain. How much of it do you think, Elizabeth, is people just don't know or forget or don't even do any of these preventative maintenance I think most of it.

I think most people, they just don't know what they don't know because they've either not built the house themselves or not from a construction background or just, just are new to homeownership. They just don't know. And I think other people, it's hard to remember when to do your maintenance tasks and when you last performed them. Let's— I mean, like the garage springs. So you're supposed to also change your garage springs every 7 years because otherwise your garage doors are going to come crashing down. Now, that's not always— some of them will elongate and last a little longer, but traditionally it's about 7 years. And lo and behold, when we changed our garage door springs, all of a sudden 7 years came up and I'm like, where did the time fly? You just— that's a long time. And all of a sudden, you know, I get this reminder saying, oh, you need to change the garage door springs. And I take care of it because I don't want a garage door coming down on my cars or me or pets or anyone.

So that's a good segue into what I like to talk about, which is the comparison of your home to your car, right? You buy a car and it comes with one owner's manual, and even if you bother to flip through certain pages, it'll tell you what you need to do in terms of maintaining it, how often you need to rotate your tires, you need to do this, change your oil, change your air filters, etc. And most cars—

The car talks to you.

It blinks at you. It tells you these little things with these little icons and it tells you, oh, it's time to do that. Right now, let's take the analogy of you just bought a house and let's say it's a 10-year-old house. Where do you as the homeowner get the single homeowner manual and the blinking from the car you— the house you just bought?

You don't. You get a lot of owner's manuals. Because there's so much variety in homes, meaning equipment, appliances, etc. There's different weather conditions wherever you live. But the other thing is, if you've got some smart home technology, it may remind you, you know, it'll beep and say you need to change batteries and what have you.

But your gutters don't have smart home devices in them. They don't.

But neither does like any potential leakage in your house. I mean, you can get some, but it's Still, like, good luck to you on that. I mean, you don't have it.

So the challenge homeowners face is there's A, no single homeowner's manual to look at, and B, there's not a dashboard that blinks at you that tells you when it's time to do these things.

No. And thus people either don't know what to do or they forget.

Right.

So to maintain it.

So maybe I'll put you on the spot, Beth. When you bought your first home, how did you learn that there were air filters in it and they needed to be changed?

I think, I think my parents told me. So I think it's because my parents were first-time homeowners. So I think they're the one that told me.

So essentially, you're relying on people who are previous homeowners to basically remind you about your air filters.

They just had to, they had to educate me first, right? But then I had to figure out a way to remind myself.

So were they proactive in teaching you these things? Or were you kind of asking them these questions about your home?

You know, I don't remember. It could have been a combination of both, or maybe it could have also been me watching my parents do some of these activities. Or, you know, my parents also asked us to do all the activities as kids. Smart move having kids. Get your kids to do all the house chores.

So today we live in, you know, the internet age of basically access to the world's information on our phones and desktops and right now. So nowadays, if you were a brand new homeowner and you bought a home and you're like, hey, what maintenance do I do? Right? You could probably find lots of online sites that tell you what—

A checklist.

But different recommendations in terms of what maintenance to do. I think that personally, the challenge of that is it's a static list, right? It's a, what should I do to maintain my home in the fall? I'm sure you could probably find 100 different sites that will give you some checklist and you could print those out. And that's probably a good starting point. But the challenge is it's not on a calendar. It's not going to remind you a year from now.

Right. That's right.

Or especially certain tasks may be quarterly, right? So going back to the, when did I change my air filters last? Or how am I going to automate and remember all these things? Because let's face it, right, maintaining and managing a home is not really fun. We all want to go out and enjoy life. And so we tend to forget these things. So, you know, I think people are searching for how do I build a maintenance calendar that's going to remind me of these preventative maintenance tasks and perhaps even what I call tailor it and tweak it to my home, right?

That's awesome.

I may have bought a home that's, you know, 30 years old and it has certain, you know, assets and equipment in it. And then there are other people that are buying a brand new home essentially, right? And what those things need as it relates to maintenance may be different. So, there's some commonality, I think, of You know, every home has gutters and they need to be cleaned, but certain homes have tankless water heaters and others still have, you know, tank water heaters, and there's probably different maintenance aspects depending on what the specific equipment is. But, um, you know, do you— can you think of other ways that people could figure out how to create a home maintenance calendar for themselves?

Yeah, I think a lot of people have done this that That we know of, or even, you know, some Homesatta customers have done as well. They've used either their calendaring system, whether it's on their phone or whether it's in their email client. So they've done that, which also blends with their work life. And I think a lot of people are frustrated with that because they, they usually want to keep their email work life and calendar separate from their personal. Work life and calendar without having to buy more, um, equipment, meaning computers and stuff to notify them and separate phones and everything else. And I also think that some people are doing that. I think some people that I know of use Excel. Now here's the challenge with Excel: they use it as a checklist of what they've actually accomplished for the year, but it doesn't provide the reminders And as most people know, or maybe they don't, so we're going to educate them. There are seasonal maintenance tasks that need to happen versus doing everything all in the beginning of the year. It's I mean you can do that, but why? I mean it's that's just it's a high level of expense because you may need to hire out for it, and also there's just tasks that need to be done throughout the year. So I think some people. who are using Excel are frustrated.

Right.

It's a, it's a kludgy way of making sure they're figuring something out. I think a lot of people do nothing because they don't know what to do, or a lot of people wait until their item breaks, which just adds more expense to their annual spend on their home, which can be frustrating. And then at the same time, that expense could be unexpected and they may not have the money for it, so they may have to go into debt for it, which is Also very frustrating for a lot of homeowners.

Right. So in terms of a sequence of solving that problem of your home doesn't come with a single homeowner's manual and there's no alerts, there's everything from, you know, searching online to get, you know, static lists. There's building it into your own calendar system, whatever you're currently using. And then there's this whole crop of new digital home management platforms, right, that are essentially going to build all of those preventative maintenance tasks for you. And they're going to lay them out on the calendar for the seasonality aspects of it.

Yes.

And most of them will send you push notifications and email alerts that basically say, hey, Beth, it's December 1st. These are the 4 tasks we recommend you do. And I think that level of, again, using that term, digital home management, is a huge help to homeowners so that they can stay on top of all these small little tasks that they need to do to properly maintain and manage their home. How about the concept of, should I be doing these tasks myself or should I be hiring a contractor to do these tasks? What's your opinion about how to address— because let's face it, there's 2 things, which is one, what do I need to do and when do I need to do it? And then, okay, now I know I need to do something. Should I be doing this myself or should I be hiring a contractor?

So, shouldn't I be asking you this question because I'm always assigning all the tasks to John, like not always, not all, but for the most part, a lot of them.

Do I get all the outdoor tasks and you get the indoor tasks? Is that how it works?

No, not always. I think it's I think it spreads out. I think I'm a bit of a control freak. I'll admit that. So I like my calendars. I like my list. I like to know that things are getting done. But I think that I'm a firm believer in if you have the time. That's the first thing. Tackle certain maintenance tasks. If you have the skill, tackle it. If you don't have the time or the skill, hire out. And one of the things that I'm always looking at is gutters. So gutters are usually on a roof of a house, at the base of a roof.

Yes.

So if you are not comfortable climbing a ladder, or if you're afraid of heights, Or you just don't trust yourself climbing a ladder for a number of reasons. There are experienced professionals that really know how to do this. Make sure that they're insured, but they know how to do this and they do it regularly. So they have all the equipment they need, the proper ladders, the proper scooping items that need to get rid of it. Scooping items, I don't know what else to call it. But they also have—

There's probably some infomercial of a special product just for cleaning. There probably is.

But there's also this aspect of, they probably don't have a fear of heights and they understand the process because they do it so regularly. So most likely they can be trusted to, to be very efficient and get this done and then also be very careful. Whereas I've seen a lot of people who try to clean their gutters and ladder accidents are a really tough one because if you fall, serious bodily damage could happen.

So, yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. It's the personal safety is really what you're talking about. And it goes back to the— there's all different ages of homeowners, right? There are people that are young and still have great mobility. And then you get people who, for various reasons, either age or some, you know, injury in their life, maybe have diminished mobility. So dealing with the personal safety. And then the other thing that you mentioned, I'll maybe drill into a little bit detail, is do you have the skill to do the task? Right. Let's face it, a lot of maintenance tasks are relatively easy. It's kind of like your— here's another one that— here's another maintenance task that a lot of people forget about, which is your refrigerator has a set of cooling coils that you can access usually at the top or the bottom, and they need to be vacuumed out once a year because it gets lint built around it. And then if you don't do it, your compressor works harder, and then all of a sudden your refrigerator breaks down and it doesn't maintain temperature.

Or your bills go up.

And then you need to replace the refrigerator, right? Pretty easy task to whip out sort of the handheld vacuum, you know, to kind of do that. But other tasks may involve what I call trade skills, right? Electrical tasks, plumbing tasks, HVAC tasks. Those are the ones that tend to, you know, probably require more skill. And those are the ones that, yeah, absolutely, if you don't have the skill, you want to, you know, hire a contractor.

Yeah, I always think of electricity. It's just a— you just want skillful people doing that. We're trained.

All right. So, Elizabeth, how about talking about the value of doing home maintenance, right? For the homeowner who's organized, got their preventative maintenance schedule, and they're sort of tackling all these things on a regular ongoing basis, what's the value to them as a homeowner?

So I think the value comes in a couple different areas. The first area is, you know exactly what you're going to spend on home maintenance annually. You start tracking all of this, you start understanding what you're going to spend. The second thing is that you are organized About the tasks you need to do. And if there is spending that needs to happen, you can manage that cash flow actually seasonally as well, which I also think is important. But also, you understand how to work with maybe the same type of contractors year over year. So you build those loyalty relationships with them, and they understand your equipment, you understand theirs. Their working capabilities and how you can organize all of your tasks is really important. So I think being organized is really important. I think understanding what needs to be done is important. I also think managing your cash flow and your overall annual finances is also important. But I also believe that when you are performing home maintenance, and a good example of that is Having your HVAC or heating and air conditioning units checked twice a year by a professional, you may be able to repair minor things at a time, which is low cost, but those professionals can also look at your equipment and say, okay, in a year or 2, we're gonna have to replace it. So you're gonna have to save money.

Right.

In order to do this, because HVAC equipment is expensive.

Right.

And so, They can actually help you prepare for that financial savings over the future and make sure that you are getting prepared, which is important. Right.

So essentially, it's saving money, properly maintaining your home, truly helping you budget with the whole, what's your total cost of homeownership, right? Most people think of homeownership costs as being purely, you know, the mortgage and the insurance, but they forget about all the maintenance and fix-it tasks. So staying on top of that is another huge value proposition. And then back to the whole maintaining and perhaps improving the value of your home, right?

Without a doubt.

Some buyers, if you had that, you know, schedule built, they may actually want a copy of that. That's something that you may consider, you know, giving to the potential buyer of your home of saying, here, I've kept all my maintenance records. You know, I've got the new roof, I've got the warranty documentation, I've got my schedule. And they may really appreciate having that. That again could sort of help you create a premium price.

Yes, and it's great for new homeowners as well because they're new to this process and they may not understand. Even new homeowners to your area, maybe they moved from a different area, that's also really valuable to them.

All right, Elizabeth, let's wrap this episode up. Let's talk about action items, right? If you were to tell our audience action items that they should, you know, leave this episode with, what's the first one that you would tell them to do?

Start tracking what you're currently doing for home maintenance. And if nothing, now's the time to start identifying what you need to do.

Yeah, my follow-up would be is, you know, A, start with the basics of just searching, you know, the internet to figure out what, you know, typical maintenance things you need to do from a preventative standpoint. But if you want to graduate beyond just a static list, then you could try to incorporate that into your current calendar system. Or you could look for digital home management software platforms that kind of build this thing for you as an action item.

Yeah, make it easy.

And then I think, again, try not to do this all at once, right? It's not like this thing that you need to do initially all at once. It's kind of a gradual thing that if you give yourself, you know, a few weekends to kind of build this maintenance calendar over time and it's what I call tweaking it to your house, right?

It's—

yes, it's— nobody knows exactly what's in your house. Do you have a tankless water heater or do you not? And what are the maintenance requirements for one that is Or one that isn't. You can start to personalize your calendar based on all that collection of building materials and assets that are in your house. Any other action items that you'd like to, you know, finish off with, or do you want to close this out and talk about our next episode?

I can't think of any other action items because I think that's a great way to start. And then once people are into it, they'll, they'll start figuring out what works for them. But thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your time, and we hope we've been able to give you some more information about home maintenance and the value of it and some small action items to get you started on making sure you're tracking the details of your home maintenance tasks. And then also divide them up among family members. It also helps making sure that works. But, uh, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Please make sure that you share this with anyone else you think could use help on managing their home. And by all means, rate us and check us out at all the major Providers of podcasts. Have a great day, and we look forward to helping you be a smarter homeowner in our next episode.

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