The phrases that mean nothing on their own
"Fully insured and bonded." "Background checked." "Fully vetted." "Trusted since 2009." These appear on almost every home-watch website in Canada, they cost nothing to type, and they are almost never questioned.
None of them are lies as such. They are simply unverified until somebody produces the document, and the entire industry has grown comfortable with nobody asking.
What to actually ask
- Can I see your certificate of insurance — insurer, coverage type, limits and expiry?
- Who specifically will attend my property, by name?
- Are they employees or subcontractors?
- What verification have you done on them, and when was it last refreshed?
- How are keys stored, and how is custody recorded?
- Where are alarm and lockbox codes held, and who can see them?
- Will my visit reports include arrival and departure times?
- What exactly is on the checklist for my property?
- What happens if you find something at 9 PM on a Sunday?
- What are you not willing to do, and what gets referred out?
- Can I see a sample report from a real visit, redacted?
- What happens to my photographs and property data if I stop being a customer?
Answers that should concern you
- "Our service satisfies your insurance requirements." No provider can determine that. Only your insurer can.
- "We do everything — plumbing, electrical, whatever you need." In Alberta those are compulsory-certification trades. A company casual about that boundary is casual about others.
- "We guarantee nothing will happen to your home." Nobody can guarantee that. Visits cap how long a problem runs; they do not prevent problems.
- "24/7 emergency response" without any detail on what that means, who responds, or how fast.
- Vagueness about who attends. If they cannot tell you who is entering your house, that is the answer.
- No written service agreement, or one that arrives after you have paid.
What a good report looks like
Ask to see one before you engage anybody. A useful report has arrival and departure times, the name of the person who attended, a completed checklist rather than a paragraph, an interior temperature reading, photographs taken from consistent positions, and an explicit statement of anything found and anything done.
A text message saying "all good at the house 👍" is not a record. It cannot be compared against last month, forwarded to an executor, attached to a claim file, or used to establish anything at all.
The neighbour question
Plenty of people have a neighbour with a key, and it is a genuinely valuable arrangement. It is also not a plan, for three reasons: it fails in the week they are also away, it puts somebody in the position of feeling responsible for an outcome they did not sign up for, and it produces no record.
The reasonable answer is usually both. Keep the neighbour — for the informal awareness a scheduled visit cannot provide — and engage someone for the scheduled, documented part.
Where we stand on this
This site publishes its trust claims individually and only turns each one on when it is true and evidenced. Where nothing is claimed, the page says so rather than reaching for a comfortable phrase.
That is not modesty. It is the only defensible position for a business whose customers are, by definition, not there to check.
Related questions
Will a home watch service satisfy my insurance requirements?
That is entirely for your insurer to determine, and any company that tells you otherwise is making a promise it has no standing to make.
Some policies require checks by a "competent person" at a defined interval and do not specify further. Others are more prescriptive. Some require no checks at all provided water is shut off and drained. Whether a particular service meets a particular condition is a question for the insurer who wrote the policy.
What a documented service does provide is evidence: dated, photographed records of when the property was attended and what was observed. If your policy requires checks, having a record that they happened is materially better than asserting it afterwards.
Before you rely on any arrangement, confirm the requirement with your broker and tell them what you have arranged. If it matters to your coverage, get their confirmation in writing.
How do you handle keys and access to my property?
Access information is treated as the most sensitive data associated with a property, because it is.
Keys are held under recorded custody: who has a key, when it was issued, and when it was returned. Keys are never labelled with an address. They are not left at the property, under anything, or in an unsecured location.
Alarm codes, lockbox codes and smart-lock credentials are handled separately from ordinary property information, are provided only to the person attending a specific visit, and do not appear in reports, notifications or general records. Nobody who does not need a code for a specific attendance has it.
Every entry to the property is logged: who attended, when they arrived, when they left, and why. That log is part of your property record and is available to you.
Where a property has smart locks, time-limited or single-use codes are preferable to a permanent shared code, and codes should be changed when arrangements change. Where a lockbox is used for a listing, its code should not be reused for property-care access.
Who actually enters my home?
You are told who attends, and every visit report names the person who attended and records their arrival and departure times.
This is the question that matters most to anyone handing over a key to an empty house, and it deserves a specific answer rather than a reassuring one. Ask any home-watch provider — including us — for specifics before you engage them: who will attend, whether they are employed or contracted, what verification has been performed on them, and what insurance is in place.
Be sceptical of unsupported claims. "Fully insured and bonded" and "background checked" appear on almost every home-watch website in Canada, and they are worth exactly as much as the documentation behind them. Ask to see a certificate of insurance. Ask what specifically was checked and when.
Where contractors attend for trade work, they are there for a specific arranged appointment, with a representative present for access, and their arrival and departure are logged the same way.
Is a property check the same as a home inspection?
No, and the difference is substantial enough that conflating them would be misleading.
A routine property visit is a visual, observational check of readily accessible areas by a trained attendant, working from a checklist. It records temperature, evidence of water, whether heating appears to be running, condition of accessible areas, and anything out of place. It does not involve dismantling anything, removing panels or covers, testing systems, or accessing concealed areas, attics, roofs or crawlspaces.
A home inspection is performed by a licensed home inspector working to a recognised standard of practice, with training, certification, professional liability insurance and a defined scope. It assesses the condition of a property's systems and components and produces a formal report.
They serve different purposes and complement each other well. An inspection tells you what condition the property is in. Monitoring visits tell you what has changed since. Findings from an inspection can be converted into specific monitoring items on the recurring checklist, which is where the two genuinely reinforce each other.
VacantHomes does not perform home inspections and holds no inspection certification. Where a professional inspection is wanted, it is performed by a qualified independent inspector and coordinated by us.