Protect Your Home While on Vacation

Hi everyone! Beth Dodson here with HomeZada. I hope everyone's having a great week. I hope you're ready for the weekend. For some of us in the United States, it's gonna be a very long weekend. We've got 4th of July coming up, and that means lots of barbecues, lots of activities, and then some travel. So first of all, I wanna say thank you all for joining me here today on this go-live video. For those of you who watch it later, Thank you for being here, and please tell us what kind of tips we can help you with when it comes to your home. Today, because of this big weekend and because of summer holidays, we're going to talk about protecting your home while you are on vacation. A lot of people seem to remember these things, some people don't, so we want to help people manage that process. So, what can we tell you and how can we help you? So, there's a couple of tips, about, I'd say, 5 maybe, that could actually be really critical to helping you manage your house. The first one is to make sure that there are items around your house put away. And a lot of people seem to leave ladders out or they leave other items that could be used to actually break into a house. Now, Someone kicking down your front door or trying to break in, you're just not going to stop that necessarily. However, you can take the necessary actions to avoid those activities by putting away items that are laying around, whether it's on your side yard, whether it's in your backyard, whether it's maybe in a shed. You might want to lock that shed up, but try to move them either into a garage or out of the way in a locked area. And that's everything from ladders to maybe you have like a big rock that someone can throw in. That you use to hold open a gate. I unfortunately do that. So I need to move that and put that somewhere where no one can reach it. So that's what I do. And I highly recommend that everyone does that. The other thing that you can do is make sure that you are locking your doors. A lot of people live in neighborhoods where everyone knows each other, which is fantastic, and I love those kinds of neighborhoods. But the reality is people come in from outside the neighborhood And they take action to take things when the house is vulnerable, and the house is vulnerable when you are not there. So, making sure your doors are locked, making sure your hideaway keys are not hideaway. Take those keys away from the hideaway area and store them somewhere, or actually hand them to a neighbor if someone needs to access your house, rather than putting them under a little rock or something else inside or in front of your door. It tends not to work. The other thing that you can do, um, in order to lock your doors, but you still need to access it, or someone else needs to access the door, for instance, like a pet sitter or someone else, you can always get keypads. And you can assign, um, specific individual, uh, keypad logins or openings for each different individuals. And those electronic keypads can be tied to an individual, like a pet sitter, that needs to access your house. And they can actually get in and you know who's been in your house versus leaving keys everywhere and then someone else might happen to see someone else put it underneath a rock or somewhere else, a mat, and they may want to access your house and they know how to easily get in the house. The third area where you can also help yourself when it comes to managing your home is to I'm sorry, my mind is escaping me for a second— is to light up your home. So oftentimes this is good no matter what time of year it is. If you have outdoor lighting, so landscaping lighting, you can turn on your timers to make sure that that lighting stays on in the evening, and that will help. You can also use timers just like you would if you have Christmas trees or some other lighting system at the end of The, the year in the holiday season, you can use timers on your lights inside your house. So I highly recommend that you try using those. Now in the summer, our days are longer, so you have to make sure you're using your lights at a later time. And that's really something you can do. So timers are a really great way, both on the inside of your house but also on the outside of your house. So good tip to make sure you're protecting your house, letting people Maybe they don't know you're quite gone, but they just don't know, so there's still a risk that they won't actually break in. The other thing that you can do, so that's, what is that, that's 3. The other thing you can do is get an alarm system. Many people do have an alarm system. Sometimes they do not operate it, and they forgot to hook, excuse me, they forget to hook it up with their alarm company. I highly recommend you do that. If you choose not to use an alarm system, you want one that's tied to maybe your phone, you can also do that. So alarm systems now come with cameras. You can see on the outside people who have come near your house. These kinds of alarm systems can also alert you to when someone is near. So another good thing about these kinds of alarm systems is you can kind of see in the videos or the pictures whether it's a true person who's ready to burglarize your home, or whether it's maybe some rodent that's somewhere around, like a squirrel or a raccoon or some other critter that is just maneuvering around your house. So, that's another good thing, is to secure an alarm system. If you do secure an alarm system, like I said, you can use the cameras. You can all— you want to make sure that you're also tying it to a company that will alert the police Should you be out of town? Oftentimes some people are traveling. They may be close by, or they may be at a campsite. At a campsite, they may not have access to cellular signals, which could cause a problem. And if someone is trying to break into your house, you want someone to be able to go and solve it before you get home and possibly deter that burglar or catch that burglar if there truly is somebody Versus having the system where you are so far away and you come home to see that your house has been damaged and there's been a burglar and they've taken things. So it's just a good idea to consider an alarm system of some sort to make sure that you can be alerted to when someone is near your home. The other thing, and probably the 5th thing that I wanted to tell you about, and yes, We are doing a Facebook Live video is be careful what you post while on vacation. I know we get so excited and we want to share where we are because it's exciting. Vacation's amazing. And we also want to potentially meet up with other people. I'm a firm believer you never know when one of your friends is in the same beach town that you're in. In fact, I see that all the time. On Facebook when one friend who hasn't seen each other in 20 years runs into somebody else while on vacation, you know, at the beach. So I totally get it. But one of the things you want to be careful with is if you post on social and you know a lot of people and people know you, they will know that you are out of town. If someone isn't there to watch the house or to periodically stop by, maybe you have a pet sitter or a house sitter that comes in and stops by every couple days, or you have a neighbor that you've alerted to your travel plans. Mm-hmm. They can actually help deter this. But if you have not said to anyone and you do not have someone checking in on your house and you're posting on social media, it's kind of a red target that somebody wants to come in and they might want to try to steal from you. So just keep that in mind. The internet is a vast array of information and data networking. I love the internet. I love the information I get from it. I love my social media. I love keeping up with my friends and some other areas of my family. I love that, but I am responsible when it comes to my social media. And I just highly recommend when you are considering traveling, be careful how much you post while you're gone. You can always come back and create an album, and you can do that here on Facebook, create videos, and you can post them at a later date and Redo the date to say, yes, I was here during this date. And that date may have been during the July 4th week. But just keep in mind, there's smart ways to use social, and there's also ways that could cause some challenges. So these are our 5 tips. Keep— protect all the things around your house by putting them away, and that will ultimately prevent people from using those items to break into your house. 2, get an alarm system if you want it. 3, Make sure you lock all your doors and get the hideaway keys are gone. You can always get a keypad. You can put them on the front of your house, or you can actually put them on the back doors. And the other thing is you want to make sure that you're trying lights. So if you've got automatic lights both inside and outside, you can use that. And then five, be careful how much you're posting on social media. These are just my, my suggestions and my tips. I want to make sure everybody's house is protected because the last thing you want when you come home from a vacation after you've had this beautiful, fun, relaxing time and you've enjoyed whatever you've decided, whether it's the beach, the mountains, camping, fireworks, you name it, maybe you're a city dweller, whatever, you just want to enjoy your time and to come home to find problems. That's just not fun. So, with these helpful tips, we hope you will have a glorious and wonderful vacation, and your home will be absolutely protected from any problems that could exist. So, thank you to everyone who joined us. Thank you to everyone who rewatches this. Please, please, please, please feel free to share these tips with your friends, your family, your colleagues. We want to make sure that everybody's house is as protected as it can be. And that you have an amazing vacation. Have a great day and have a happy vacation and a happy 4th of July.