From booking to coming home
Handing somebody your house is the uncomfortable part.
So here is exactly what happens, in order, including the things you decide in advance and the things we will not do whatever the situation looks like on the day.
Before you go — a conversation, not a form
We work out what the property actually needs, which is mostly a function of how long you are away and what time of year it is. A fortnight in June and five months over a Calgary winter are not the same service and should not be sold as though they were.
This is also where we tell you if you do not need us. A neighbour who is genuinely reliable, a short absence in a mild month, a condo with a concierge — those are real answers and you will get them.
The handover visit
Somebody comes to the property while you are still there. This is the visit that makes everything afterwards possible, and it is the one worth being present for.
Access is set up — a lockbox fitted, a key logged into the register, or a code issued, depending on what you have chosen. A full photographic baseline is taken, inside and out, so that every later report has something to be compared against. The shut-off is located and photographed. The thermostat is set and photographed. Filter sizes get written down.
You tell us the things that are only in your head: which window sticks, that the back bedroom runs cold, that the gate valve turns but is stiff. Those go on the property record and every attendant sees them.
What you decide in advance
Three things get agreed before you leave, because deciding them at 6am from another continent is how bad decisions happen.
How much we may spend on urgent protective work without reaching you first — stopping something getting worse. It can be nothing, and plenty of people leave it there. Whatever you choose is written down and shown to you in your account.
How easily you can be reached, honestly. Somebody on a ship for eleven days is a different escalation problem from somebody three hours ahead who answers instantly, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
Who we call, and in what order. At minimum an emergency contact. Usually also a neighbour, whoever else holds a key, and — if there are animals — the vet.
While you are away
Visits happen on the schedule you agreed, and every one produces a written, dated, photographed report you can read the same day. Nothing is a text message saying it looked fine.
If something is found, it becomes an issue with a severity, and you get told. Urgent findings are emailed rather than left for you to discover next time you open the app. Everything is on one timeline — visits, findings, decisions, and every entry to the property, with who and by what method.
Coming home
A return visit before you land, so the house is warm, the water is on if it was off, and anything that needs doing before you walk in has been done.
The whole record stays yours. Every report, every photograph, every entry, for as long as the account exists — which matters more than people expect at the point they sell the property, or make a claim, or need to show somebody what a thing looked like in November.
The standing authority, in plain terms
This is the part people skim and then regret skimming, so it is worth being slow about.
If an attendant finds water where it should not be, there are two bad outcomes. One is that they wait for permission while the damage gets worse. The other is that somebody spends your money on work you did not want.
A standing limit is how you choose between those. You set an amount we may spend on urgent protective work — stopping something getting worse — without reaching you first. Anything above it, and anything that is not urgent, waits for you however long that takes.
Set it to nothing and we will contact you about everything. That is the safe default and it is a legitimate choice, as long as you understand what it means: if you are genuinely unreachable, nothing happens.
Whatever you choose is shown in your account for the whole time you are away, and every dollar spent under it is itemised on the visit report — the attendance fee and each task separately, never one blended number.
What we never hold
The handover is where a service like this usually starts collecting things it should not.
There is no field in our system for an alarm code, a lockbox code, a keypad code, or where a key is hidden. Not an empty one — no field at all. The database records that an entry happened, who made it and by what method, and never the credential that made it possible.
The booking form rejects those fields if they are submitted anyway. So does the contacts form in your account. That is deliberate: the defence has to live at the door, not in a policy document, because the realistic way a lockbox code ends up in a database is somebody helpfully typing it into a notes box.
Access credentials are handled separately, with their own access control and their own audit trail. How access actually works covers the four methods and what each one costs you in convenience.
The honest version
Most of what goes wrong in an empty house is slow and cheap to stop early. A supply line weeping behind a vanity is a repair in week one and a restoration in week six. The whole service is an argument about that gap, and the handover is where you decide how narrow you want it to be.