Vacant Home Checks

The honest answer is that it depends on the season, the property and — critically — what your own insurance policy says. There is no universal standard, and anyone who gives you a single number without asking about your policy is guessing.

That said, the practical logic is straightforward. The damage from most vacant-property failures is proportional to how long they run undetected, so the visit interval is effectively a cap on your worst-case outcome. A leak found after three days and the same leak found after three weeks are very different events.

In practice, weekly is the most common cadence for an Alberta property during the heating season, with owners increasing to twice weekly or every 72 hours during extreme cold. Through summer, weekly or biweekly is common. Properties with known risk factors — poly-B plumbing, an aging hot water tank, a history of basement water, or no water shut-off — warrant more frequent visits than a newer, lower-risk property.

The number that actually matters is the one in your policy. Many policies contain a required check interval during extended absences, and some specify who must perform it. Call your insurer or broker and ask directly before you leave.

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.

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.

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.

By email after each visit, with a notification when the visit is complete.

Each report contains the arrival and departure time, who attended, the completed checklist, the timestamped photographs, any observations, anything found, anything done, and the next scheduled visit.

Anything urgent does not wait for the report — it is communicated immediately through every channel you have provided.

Reports accumulate into a continuous record of the property, which is what makes them useful beyond the individual visit. Comparing this week against six weeks ago is what catches the slow problems.