In another thread, people were fantasizing about winning the lottery and owning homes in multiple cities. I know people do this. Even just a winter home/summer home situation. But who watches over your place when you’re living in the other one? I’m particularly interested in folks who have residences in more rural areas. I’d like to have two modest homes, but I don’t know how you’d make sure all your stuff wasn’t stolen in a rural setting. Do any of you have this kind of arrangement? How do you manage it?
My parents keep two homes, although neither of them are rural. When they’re not here, I go by the house every so often, pick up the mail, etc. When they’re not in Florida, the neighbors there are good friends and they look after the house (and we try to convince them to use the pool but it’s tough going). They’re never gone from either for a really long time though - I don’t know what people who are seasonal residents do.
If I were to win really huge in the lottery, I personally would hire a personal assistant/major domo. I have a close friend whom I trust and she would be the first person I’d offer the job to. I’d offer a salary, health benefits, retirement, etc. I’d ask that she hire whomever she feels necesssary (after discussing with me) in order to make sure things like this were attended to.
VCNJ~
There are two types of second homes I’ve come across:
Cabins, no one watches them, you don’t keep anything valuable there, and if someone steals the 20 year old television, oh well.
Homes, you hire someone, usually a management company, but sometimes just a caretaker. Its more than watching the stuff (you still don’t keep anything really valuable there), its making sure the storm windows get closed, the mold doesn’t grow, the garden doesn’t develop into a jungle.
I know someone who lives in off-season housing (in this case, a Seattle house boat.) She lives rent free in exchange for watching the place, and a couple times a year she has to shove everything in a closet and bunk with her parents for a few weeks.
I work for a man who has three houses. One is in FL in a gated community with a management company. The mgmt. co. does drive-bys every day and also monitor constantly during hurricane season. The second is on an island. He has two caretakers to monitor the house, keep things neat, check to make sure the pipes aren’t frozen, etc. The third house is in Boston and they have a full-time housekeeper (not live-in) and a management co., so there is someone there Mon.-Fri. to make sure nothing goes wrong.
Unless the second homes are really rustic or have nothing of value, I don’t know how middle-class people can afford to have them monitored. In a hurricane zone, I can’t imagine not having someone there to check every time there’s a storm.
I live in a small community in Maine, adjacent to the Canadian border. At the end of nowhere. The last two summers people from Massachusetts (mostly) discovered our town and have been coming up here to buy the cheap houses (which has driven the prices and the property taxes up and some of the natives out). Now a lot of the houses are vacant over the winter, which has spawned a new management business which will check on your house when it is vacant and make sure the pipes don’t freeze, etc. With the advent of the snowmobile, giving access to remote homes, we have had cases of summer homes being vandalized. That is a problem for which I don’t have a solution. I myself sometimes leave for extended periods of time to visit family in other states. I live in a “neighboorhood” so I haven’t had any problems. I do have summer people on both sides of me so no one is there in the winter, but the police station is just across the way and they cruise up this street on the way out of town so I feel pretty safe. Before the people from away started buying up homes I used to depend on my neighboors to watch the house; but they are gone now.
My parents technically have three residences. They own a brownstone in Brooklyn. They also rent an apartment in San Francisco. And they also own a cottage on Long Island (Easthampton, inherited), which is more rural than suburban, but still has near neighbors.
The cottage is “closed down” for the winter, water and electric are turned off and everything is shut down. (they only use it in the spring and fall, renting it in the summer). During the times of the year when it is in use, they have a caretaker guy that comes by now and then (I think he also mows the lawn and such) and they made friends with the next-door neighbors, who would call if a tree fell on the place or something.
When they are in SF they usually have housesitters in NYC (trusted friends or adult children of friends) who water the plants and call the plumber if a pipe bursts. The tenant (fourth floor) usually picks up the mail. They also have employees in the NYC office who can check in on things if there are not currently any housesitters (the office is in the upper floor of the building with a separate entrance).
That said if no one checks on the cottage or house for a week, they don’t worry about it. They certainly don’t see the need for everyday checkups. They are often gone longer than a week on business, even when they are staying in NYC.
Neighbors, caretakers, or nobody. In my area, where most houses are occupied only seasonally, there are several local caretakers. They typically drive by every few days, stop in and/or do a walkaround periodically, and handle any special requests like grass cutting, snow plowing, draining the water lines to winterize, or reversing the process in the Spring. They are on call for emergencies and contact the owner if something really bad happens.
Haven’t seen it happen around here yet, but webcams could be installed with passwords so only authorized parties could view them. That would help both owners and caretakers (but first, the caretakers will have to buy a computer and learn what the Internet is – they’re just now getting used to answering machines and celphones!).
Iris and I have a second house in West Virginia. We only just got it this past spring. We don’t keep anything of real value there, there are some DVDs and a bunch of books, two arcade machines, an older TV and stereo. While we do have five acres, there’s no one around us.
We don’t worry much about having things stolen since there would be no reason to. The worst I fear is a fire, but we make sure everything is turned off, and a lot of times I turn off the electric box just to be sure. We don’t see a need for anyone to really check on it as we did go out every other weekend or more over the summer. Though I am thinking on getting an older truck to park out front just to make it look like someone lives there year round.
We have a cabin about 110 miles from the city. Usually we go up Thursday night and come back Sunday evening. It’s rural, but there are houses within sight, our cabin can be seen from the road, and the community’s fairly tight. We go year round, so we’ve never closed it up for a winter. We just turn the heat down when we leave. While it would be a drag if some of our stuff got stolen, I just don’t worry about it. There’s nothing up there that can’t be easily replaced. Our big worry is the basement flooding. It happens from time to time so I just make sure I’m up there when an unusual amount of rain is forecast.
Our apartment in the city is about 20 feet from the entrance to the building and the doorman, so that’s not a concern. All our mail comes to the city.
We just have a number displayed for the cabin - no name or mailbox. We also have a little pickup truck that doesn’t run parked there.
My inlaws have a primary residence in Boston’s Back Bay. They also have a 300 acre farm in New Hampshire that they spend Friday night - Sunday night at every week. They have two full-time caretakers there that live in another house on the property. The caretakers take care of the animals, do farm chores as well as skilled labor to pay their rent. After the rent is worked off, they get a paycheck. It is a pretty sweet deal for the caretakers. They get to live on a huge, beautiful farm and get paid for it.
They also have a house on the island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. They go there are couple of weeks a year and a rental management company takes care of renting and maintaining most of it the rest of the year.
They also own a house that came with a factory in the Tuscany region of Italy. They let one one of the original owners of the factory live in part of it as long as he keeps it maintained.
There is other stuff too but those are mainly rental properties. Personally, I think that stuff is a major PITA. I just like one great house for myself. I will gladly pay someone for temporary accomodations anywhere in the world and there won’t be semi-permanent strings attached.
Here in Minnesota, we have a lot of people with lake ‘cabins’ up north.
Generally, you close them up in the fall, removing anything too valuable or too portable. But you generally don’t care too much about the 20-year-old TV, the old living room couch, the old beds, etc. That’s what you have insurance for.
But there are also companies around that will, for a price, go by your cabin every week or two, and check to see that things look OK – no break-ins, snow-collapsed roofs, etc. Or you might bribe neighbors who live up there year-round to do the same thing. There is some controversy about this, because many of these companies seem to be operated by a Sheriff or deputies. Some people object to paying extra for what they think their taxes ought to cover.
Of course, all this doesn’t apply if you’re a snomobiler – they use the cabin up north thru the winter just like the summer.