Ep 050 - Before the Storm Hits: What Smart Homeowners Do Differently

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 Bodrozik 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, John and Beth.

Hi, welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. I am Beth Dodson. Our question for today is, do you really know what extreme weather patterns are in your specific location in the United States and how those extreme weather patterns affect your home. With me is John Bedrosian, one of our other hosts and co-founders of HomeZada. John, we've talked about this before, and unfortunately, a lot of people come to us, a lot of homeowners come to us after the fact of when an extreme weather event hits their home to help create some organization around that weather event. The first thing I think we need to talk about is What do we define as an extreme weather event? I have my thoughts. I'd love to hear yours.

Yeah, I think extreme weather events are a singular event that could significantly damage or destroy your home.

And— Let's give examples.

Yeah, so examples are a wildfire that comes through your house, a blizzard/avalanche of just a massive amount of snow.

Oh, totally.

Tornado season. Hurricane season.

Yep.

Oftentimes torrential rains turn into floods.

Yes.

Now, sometimes these are combined together. Certainly you could have floods with hurricanes, especially a different type of flood, storm surge, if your house is on the coast.

Yes. We have earthquakes. We haven't seen a lot of those.

You could have earthquakes. Yes, you could have, um, hail, heavy, heavy hail. A lot of times wind is a huge issue. Oh yes, wind oftentimes comes with a wildfire, wind comes with a tornado, wind comes with a hurricane. But there may be some days that are just high, high winds that don't come with all those other things, and those high winds also create A lot of issues. You get specific events around like hail, which are severe thunderstorms that create hail and/or freezing rain.

Now, okay, these are—

Also severe weather also could be temperature drops where it's not raining or snowing, it's just that it's gotten, instead of 40 degrees, it's got down to zero.

Yes.

In that one sort of cold snap for like 2 or 3 days.

Yeah. And we had that a lot across this country for a couple of months in places that don't normally get those cold weather patterns. So with that said, what is the impact of all of these different extreme weather events on our homes?

Huge.

I mean, let's talk about this. Huge. Huge.

And it varies depending on the weather event, but correct, with a wildfire, your home will lose—

you can lose the whole thing with a wildfire.

Correct. At the end of the day, your home is a structure that combines multiple building materials together and equipment and appliances. And then your home is located somewhere across the country. We have a wide diversity of 50 states. subject to different weather, severe weather conditions.

Yes.

And then based on that physical structure being subject to that severe weather conditions, any one of those things can cause significant damage and/or destruction. So as an example, significant damage may be that cold, cold snap. It drops from 40 to 0 and your pipes burst as a result of it and creates a massive internal flood.

Yeah.

Big, huge damage.

And the lack of use of water in your home.

Correct. Another example is just pure wind from any one of these things. Windstorm hits your house, blows over trees and branches into your roof and into your siding and into your windows.

Oh yeah. Which creates more water in your home.

Correct. So there's so many— it's there, there's I believe that there is almost like a matrix that matches up where your home is, what severe weather is likely to hit your home, and what are the types of damages that that severe weather could impact your home. And it's different depending on where you are because, yeah, you live in, you know, the mountains of Colorado in the summertime, maybe you're subject more to wildfires. Versus if you live in Arkansas, Tennessee, in the springtime, you're subject to tornadoes.

Yeah. And to your point, it's like the Rubik's Cube of geography and weather in the United States, which makes this country so massively valuable and awesome and beautiful. But it comes with certain risks.

And I think—

In certain areas.

2 other human sort of elements to this, I think, is you have some homeowners who've lived in the same place for a long time. They probably already know what the severe weather events are that they face because they lived in the same location for 20, 30 years, but they get caught off guard because it's not something that's always top of mind because life takes over, right? Other things are worried, and you may not be cognizant that you need to Be proactive to prevent these kinds of damage. And then the other aspect of it is a lot of people are moving all across the country. We're just a mobile society and moving from state A to state B. And you may not even be aware of what the severe weather events that may damage or destroy your home are. So having research and analysis to be able to provide you that, it's going to be really helpful to make you a smarter homeowner.

It's ironic how people— like, because we have friends that live all over the country, and my friends who live in the Kansas area and the Missouri area often suffer from tornadoes, and they couldn't imagine like a wildfire or an earthquake. They're like, that would be so scary. And I'm like, but people like myself who've never experienced a tornado would be like, well, a tornado seems like it would be scary. And they're like— Oh, it's a cakewalk. You just prepare for it. It's so funny how wherever people are, if they're used to something, they know how to prepare for it, to your point. And it's less scary than the one that they're unfamiliar with. And that goes back to your point, people moving all over the place who are unfamiliar with the extreme weather that could cause risk to not only their home, but to their person as well. And how to actually manage through that. Find people— first tip, find people that live in the area and they'll give you all the tips about how to manage that specific weather event. That's the first tip. Um, but no, seriously, there is—

Can I add one more thing?

Sure.

Oftentimes severe weather has different, what I call, lead times to warn people.

Oh, totally.

Like a hurricane has a decent amount of lead time because—

Yeah.

Weather forecasting's gotten pretty good. You could watch any weather news station you want. They're like, hey, it's coming here in the next 3 to 5 days. Tornadoes are a little bit more difficult. Now, it might be like, hey, this is the high-risk time or evening, but you don't really know whether the tornado's going to hit your house or 10 miles away, kind of mentality.

Correct.

So there's oftentimes what I call the lead time over what type of event is coming That gives you the opportunity to either prepare or catches you off guard and you don't have enough time to prepare, which means you should have been preparing before you thought that this severe weather event was coming.

You bring up a good point, especially even individual high-risk areas or high-risk extreme weather conditions. So for instance, Uh, we live in wildfire area. Wildfires can move fast if the wind is moving it, and it can move fast and rapidly where you've got to exit wherever community that you're in as quickly as possible. Or without the addition of the wind, it could actually be contained and not move as fast, and you may get more time to leave. Oh, that's interesting. So Yeah, to your point, the extreme weather conditions vary, but even the types of extreme weather, the same weather pattern could vary depending on what other weather is on top of it.

Yes.

I think I'm explaining that properly.

Yes. So that's why there's such a tight relationship between your home and severe weather and where you live.

Yes. And there is, and it's complex. We— you have to be prepared in order to manage extreme weather wherever you live. Now, because we are talking about preparedness and we believe in that and we want to help everybody be as smart as possible as it comes to homeownership, let's talk maintenance. What can we do to help homeowners manage or maintain parts of their home to avoid more disaster? Because you can mitigate risk. Everyone can always mitigate risk. What could we do as it relates to maintenance to help prevent that?

Yeah, 100%. And it goes almost back to that matrix. It's like, well, which type of severe weather are we trying to mitigate? So I'll go back to the cold snap. Cold snap means you need to insulate your pipes, especially if they're outside the house or even in your basement. You need to know where your water shutoff valves are. You need to clean your gutters to eliminate any water from freezing and creating an ice dam that damages your gutters and your roof.

Yeah.

You know, springtime is oftentimes tornado season. Usually that is, you know, how can I prepare for that? It's trying to minimize things that are outside of your house that are in your control from the wind picking up and throwing into your house.

Correct.

So a lot of it can be patio furniture, barbecues, all of the things that are sort of—

Umbrellas.

Umbrellas that are outside of your house. Maybe you move those things indoors if you know those types of events are coming. You know, that's a good thing to do also for hurricanes as well. Correct. Because any, any sort of high wind, even wildfires come with high wind, but wildfires also are trying to create a perimeter to minimize fuel for the fire.

Yeah.

So do you have dry brush around your house? Dry dead trees, trim back dead limbs that you should be pruning. You're trying to sort of maintain the landscape on the outside of your house to prevent the severe weather from getting to that and then dragging it into your home kind of mentality, whether it's the windstorm that knocks over the dead branch into your, into your roof, or it's the wildfire that burns your dead tree. And then those embers are a short distance to get to your house, which catches your house on fire.

And by the way, we're not here to tell people to cut down their trees. I'm not here to say that. But having a perimeter around your house of healthy trees that are not at risk of damaging the house, meaning trimming back branches from windows, trimming back dead areas, and then maybe even trimming back larger trees from the main area of the house, but letting them reside elsewhere on the lot is what we're big proponents of.

Yes.

Yeah. Okay.

I mean, like hurricanes, especially people that live on the coast, oftentimes it's— you get storm surge, which floods your first floor. So people oftentimes move their valuable stuff if they live in a 2-story home. Or they'll get sandbags to try and create a perimeter to try and prevent sort of that water from flowing into their house kind of mentality.

Yeah, that's a good point. You know, even taking steps, if you've got a lot of electronics or what have you, for instance, maybe you have an office and you've got computers or whatnot that you need to perform your work, moving those electronics to higher elevation or higher levels, whether it's on the first floor or the second floor, can actually prevent damage, and obviously unplugging them as well.

Yeah, absolutely. That's why I say preparing for the severe weather event is really dependent on what the weather is. And it gets into the, you're not trying, you can't avoid the severe weather event.

No.

It's the, what can you do to minimize the potential of damage? Prune those trees, move the furniture kind of mentality. Insulate the pipes, all these different examples. And then that reduces the possibility of if it does hit your house, maybe your house then escapes any significant damage because you've done that preparation work. But then there's even the— here's another example, which is the event happens and you're trying to minimize damage right after the event. And—

Good point.

But very recent, right? Blizzards. Create 3 to 4 feet of snow on your roof.

Totally.

Okay, so your house didn't get damaged because of the blizzard, but now you have 3 feet of snow on your roof, and that's a lot of weight, and it's weighing down your, your roof. So there's a lot of people that will either hire somebody or do it themselves. They call them snow rakes. Get out there with a long telescoping rake, and you're basically trying to rake some of that snow off of your roof. So that it doesn't sit on there and create that extra weight and load. And guess what? That snow is going to melt and there's gonna be a large volume of water and you wanna minimize leaks into the roof. So there's, again, I think that, I mean, candidly, this is a little bit where HomeZotica is such a great tool because it helps homeowners really try to map an analysis of their house with the severe weather and gives them sort of these levels of guidance because there's— So many things that we can do to minimize, prevent the damage from happening in the first place, minimize the damage after, and/or, you know, try to avoid it altogether.

No, that's fantastic. So the other thing we see a lot of as it comes to extreme weather is insurance companies requiring documentation as a result of this. Okay, let's just say they're, you couldn't mitigate enough of the situation, you do need to address some sort of claim.

Yep.

One of the things that insurance companies and yourself may require is documentation of what you own as a homeowner inside the home, around the home, to complete that claim. So John, a lot of times insurance companies require this in their contract, yet most people don't read it. But why else is documenting what you own in the form of a home inventory important for homeowners?

Yeah, I think it's, it's twofold. It's one, it's part of the preparation process to be prepared for severe weather, which is creating an inventory. And this really boils down to 2 things: the inventory of your personal property, Your furniture, your electronics, your clothes, your power tools, and then the inventory of the actual structure of your house, your roof, your windows, your siding, your HVAC, all those other kinds of things. Once you have that inventory, now you can share that with your insurance agent, carrier, whatever, and say, hey, am I properly insured? And then we also get into also the analysis over Yes, home insurance is a basic policy, but then there are additional policies that you can get for severe weather events. So that's another part of the analysis that you could do is, hey, if my home is subjected to floods, maybe there's an additional flood insurance that I should be getting or considering, or earthquake, or whatever the case may be. So part of that inventory process is, am I properly insured? And sort of reviewing all of your different policies to say, are you— Are you prepared?

Yeah.

On the back end of that is, okay, yeah, now your house has been subject to a severe weather event. You had either damage, significant damage. Now you need to document what has been damaged and make it simple. The more you have, essentially the before and after, the easier you are in terms of the documentation with your insurance company. Because if you have the before photos, i.e., the inventory of your house without You know, as it is today, no damage. And then you go out and take pictures of the tree fell, hit your roof, broke your gutters. You have a hole in one section of your roof. You got water pouring down into your living room, but all the other rooms in your house are currently okay. Then you're sort of taking photos of the sofa and the TV that got damaged in that area. And that's the before and after kind of mentality that streamlines the process. to working with your insurance company to get the claim filed, processed, and eventually sort of reimbursed and rebuilt.

Quickly at that. The insurance claim process, by having the before and after, you could possibly have a claims process that moves along faster. And based on some previous podcasts that we did with insurance adjusters, they prefer that. Any documentation allows their job to be easier as well. And the reason why I'm laughing a bit is because John just keeps describing the most grimmest of situations as it relates to—

I wanted to talk about severe weather.

Severe weather. It's quite funny. The tree fell down, you got water coming in, everything. It's so funny. But yes, to your point, this documentation can speed up The process of getting your claims processed properly and easily and efficiently, and there's no second-guessing or questioning because you already know what's going on.

It also—

this is fantastic.

It also helps you mentally, meaning if there is a severe weather event that causes damage to your home, usually there's some mental and emotional anguish and pain, psychological. You're like, oh my God, my house. I've lived here 20 years. So and so got damaged. You're not necessarily thinking correctly because you're dealing with a traumatic event that's happened to your house. And when you're dealing with you know that level of trauma that happened to your house, if you haven't done that before, then you're sort of scrambling like well I didn't do that before and now what am I going to do? And your mind starts to sort of move in so many different directions that you may not be necessarily thinking. As clearly as you could be if you weren't prepared upfront for these kinds of things, which is why all of that preparation of knowing where your house is, what severe weather events are, what can you do to minimize all that, have an inventory, puts you in a frame of mind where— which is, I read this quote, it's like, weather doesn't just happen to a homeowner. You have to manage weather as a homeowner.

Oh, that's a good point. That's a good point because it's coming no matter what, no matter where you live.

Yes.

Weather happens no matter where you live.

Yes.

So now it's time to manage accordingly to where you live. Now, I'm going to use this phrase because you used it. And one of the biggest suggestions we encourage people to do is not only document this information, because you explained a lot about proactive versus reactive, having a calmer mind, uh, because you have taken the time and the steps to manage all of this. But the, the other thing that you referenced, you use this phrase called a digital twin of your house.

Yes.

And because we know the physical house structure exists and it can get damaged, explain to the audience what you mean by a digital twin of your house. Yeah.

I mean, perfect segue because your house is a physical structure. It's— you could walk around the outside, the inside. You've got X number of rooms, you've got stuff in it, this, that, and the other. It's all physical. A digital twin of your house is, can you aggregate all the data about the interior and the exterior of our house around everything and have a digital version of it? And that's kind of a combination of photos, photos over the front, the back, and the side of your house, photos over every room, close-up photos of your HVAC and your hot water heater, close-up photos of all the power tools in your garage. your shoe collection in your closet, your guitar collection that you're an avid guitar player, coin collector, all of these things. If you can photo, have photos of these things and/or videos is also a good analogy of a digital twin.

Yep, sure.

And perhaps sort of an itemized list of the data around all these things. So now you have a digital, you have essentially a digital representation in one complete location of the entire physical aspects of your house. That is essentially what a digital twin is. And there, you could even go into a little bit of a more higher level, which is like, what's the current value of your house? That's not really a digital— that's not really a physical thing that you can walk into your house and point to some closet and say, here's the value of my house. It's usually on a piece of paper or an appraisal or, you know, an online sort of home automation system, home valuation system.

Sure.

But that's also a digital representation, as well as your mortgage balance, as well as your home equity, your insurance policy. How much coverage do you have?

Yeah.

Right? Because we're talking insurance and severe weather. Essentially, that is still a digital representation of your insurance policy. Most people think of an insurance policy as a series of papers or a PDF. But if you combine that digital representation with all of the photos of all those physical things. Your digital twin is much more in-depth as it relates to having all of the data about your house. And once you have that digital twin, then it becomes much more easier to analyze all this information and give you better recommendations over what you can do to minimize risk, evaluate your insurance policy, all of these things because you have a digital version of it. Hopefully that makes sense.

It does make sense. I mean, anything that you can do to digitally consolidate information about your house in one set of records or a record-keeping system will help people better understand the entirety of the home and the complexity of it, because it is complex. It's got a lot of parts and pieces.

Yes.

And how to manage it moving forward. How to prevent situations from further damaging the home, like extreme weather. And then if that weather does impact your home, then because you have this digital twin, you now have enough information to work through the claims process cleanly, efficiently, and effectively with your insurance adjuster and insurance provider.

Yes, I'll give you a real-life example, right? Which is your insurance policy has coverage around your personal property. So if your house completely got destroyed, it says, you know, we'll pay you up to, let's say, $400,000 for all your personal property. Well, once you look at that on your insurance policy, if you walk around your house, you're looking at all your furniture and electronics and this, that, and the other, and those are all the physical objects. You're like, well, is that enough or is that too much? You don't have a digital version of all of those personal property. You only have the physical. Therefore, you can't compare mentally. You can't walk through your house and go, yeah, you might be able to go, yeah, I think my stuff is worth $200 grand or yeah, my stuff is worth $700 grand.

Point taken.

You don't know because you're only looking at the physical version of your dining room table and your TV and this, that, and the other. You don't have a digital version of a photo that sort of estimated the value of those things in a report that says, oh yeah, my stuff is worth $550 grand. Maybe I do need a higher level of personal property coverage. That's kind of an example of trying to understand why the digital twin is important, because the physical has to have a digital in order to map it to the insurance coverage.

That's smart. Yeah, that is smart. And so Thank you for that. So as it relates to extreme weather, if every homeowner could do 3 things this year to better protect their home from any climate risks, what are your top 3 things? I have mine.

I'd say first is to assess your home location with what severe weather events are typical for your location.

Okay.

And that kind of goes back to the— there's enough data out there. You can get that inside of Homesata. You can do that on your own over like, okay, I live in this state, in this region of the world. Again, think about seasons. Most severe weather tends to be seasonal— winter, spring, summer, fall. What is most likely to happen to potentially my house? That's the first thing. The second thing, maybe a subset of that, which is, okay, what are the things based on those significant events that I can do to minimize potential damage to my home?

Mm-hmm.

What are the proactive measures to create prevention, preventing these things from damaging my home? Because I've assessed that my home is subject to these 3 weather events, and if I do these 5 things, then I'm less likely to have damage that I have to deal with.

Yeah.

And I'd say the third thing is think about creating a digital twin of assessing all the things, personal property, as well as all the building materials and assets of your house equipment to create that digital twin, because you're going to be much better prepared, not only for the maintenance and, I mean, for the claim situation, But even preventative maintenance.

Totally.

Because your HVAC needs servicing and your, you know, your furnace needs servicing and that ties back to the, it's going to drop below freezing and my furnace is going to be working harder kind of mentality. So those are the 3 things that I would suggest people do to just be better organized and prepared around understanding how severe weather has a direct impact to your personal home.

Yeah, I have very similar ones that I would recommend to homeowners to do in a year.

Yeah, absolutely.

And the first one is, I would suggest they do document everything around their house. That's the first thing that I would suggest, that they document everything that they own, physical possessions, as well as the property itself. I would have that. That's the first step. So we're aligned there. The second thing I would do is I would also Document not just the location of something, but how to do certain things. So I'm a firm believer in know where your water shut-off valve is, know where your electrical shut-off valve is, those types of things. And I don't always know how to do those things, so I video record John doing it. And so for those of you who don't know, we are married, but I. Actually videotape him recording it, and I put it in Hamzada because if I need to reference it, I reference it if he's not around. So how to turn it on and how to turn it off. So that's the second thing that I would recommend because sometimes that's good preventative or mitigative risk management to the operation of your home. And then the third thing I would recommend is. Because John's already recommended some of the others, I'd recommend find people in your community who are originally from whatever location that you are moving to or live in who are familiar with these types of weather, extreme weather events, so that one, they can show you how to manage through it, and they can show you how to mitigate any potential damage through it. And that will also calm you down and help you understand that, okay, other people have lived through this. They've made it. Their houses have made it. It's a matter of proper steps to take. And oftentimes I think people spin out of control Because their emotions take over and fear takes over and their adrenaline shoots up versus if they just take the time to understand. To your point earlier, you said know the weather conditions in your region. If they actually ask community members that have lived through this, then they have a better way of calming themselves down when the events do occur. Even if they get spiked up a little bit, then they will remember that conversation that they had and said, "Okay, it spiked. Time to calm down and get it together." And then, have I taken the steps to prepare for this? And now what's next?

So yeah, great tips.

These are these are all great tips that both of us have have recommended that homeowners can take just for the simple. This year, they're very simple. They're not that hard. So with extreme weather, we talked about what types of extreme weather could occur. We talked about preparation for potential extreme weather in a variety of different ways, whether it's documentation, whether it's understanding the environment, whether it's preventing certain areas from getting. Causing more damage. We did talk about prevention itself, you know, tasks that people could do. We talked about understanding communities in their area. And then we also talked about once a weather event does happen, how to take the best recommendations to still manage and mitigate risk, aka the blizzard-type snowpack sitting on top of a roof, making sure that you are understanding that just because the weather event is over, it doesn't mean—

Correct.

That there's still not risk. So, how do you manage through that risk? And then, you and I are firm believers, we didn't really talk about it, but we are firm believers, this is an ongoing relationship with your house. Mitigating this risk and doing these preventative tasks is an ongoing relationship with your house, whether or not there is extreme weather. We're just using extreme weather as an event aspect for this podcast so that people can understand that extreme weather generally gets people going and starting to make change to things around their house because they don't want the impact of that weather to get worse. on their homes.

Correct.

So we've talked about this. We've talked about some tips that everyone can take within the next year. And John and I came up with different ones. But is there anything else, John, that you want to leave people with?

I mean, you know, AI is the big rage, right, in our society today, right? So there's the concept of what we call homeowner intelligence. And a lot of this has to do with the more you can sort of aggregate all the data about your house, then you can sort of use systems to be able to make you smarter and make those better decisions. And so one example of that is even the severe weather alerts, especially because the National Weather Service issues weather alerts and they issue them all across the country based on region. Well, your home When you— your home has got GPS coordinates, latitude and longitude. Oftentimes latitude and longitude for your home is tied to the weather alerts. So example of homeowner intelligence is being able to connect the severe weather alert over what are the specifics of the weather, how high are the winds going to be, is it gonna affect my home, and then use homeowner intelligence to kind of process that information. 2 to, you know, a day or 2 before the event that gives you even more specifics to not only protect your home, but also protect your pets and your family and human life as well.

Yeah.

As well. You know, I think that we're just living in a society with AIs is, can be very, very helpful for us as consumer homeowners to be better and smarter. And it's just taking a little bit of effort to kind of combine all these things together because it's really gonna be, proactively help you with managing weather, your house, and your family.

Oh, that's fantastic. So for— thank you all for joining us on another episode of Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. Please feel free to share this if you think anyone can benefit from our podcast. And at the same time, if you like this and you want to subscribe, we invite you to do that as well. And by all means, we're always looking for other topics. So if you have a specific topic that's really coming from your gut and your heart And you want us to talk about it, please submit it to us, and we will talk about it. Even if we don't have the experience, we will bring on guests that do have that experience. So thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. And until the next time, have a wonderful day.

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