Is It Time To Winterize Your Property?

Time to Winterize Your Vacant Home

It’s that time of the year again! The record-breaking heat of the North Texas summer has given way to cooler fall temperatures. We’re all breathing a sigh of relief and enjoying the change of seasons.

The cooler fall temperatures will fade into winter. It’s not unusual for North Texas to experience freezing temperatures.  While this might simply be an inconvenience to many of us, it can be a disaster if you have a vacant home.

If your vacant home is not heated, you really need to consider having the property winterized. The winterization process is relativity inexpensive (a couple of hundred dollars) and can save you thousands in damage and repairs that result from freezing pipes.

One local resource in the greater Dallas area is Kissee Inspections. Mark has winterized a number of vacant homes for us over the years and does quality work at reasonable prices. Mark is offering a Winterization Special. Click on the ad below for larger version.

Kissee Winterization Special

Don’t wait until we have that inevitable cold snap as the few contractors who do this kind of work will be swamped.

Photo – Copyright 2011 Tom Branch

Consider Winterizing Your Vacant House

While many people think that Texas is hot and dry, we do get a couple of hard freezes a year. For most people it simply means that the heat runs a bit more. However, if your house is vacant and the utilities have been turned off it could result in thousands of dollars in freeze damage.

Snowfall in Texas

Copyright 2011 - Imaged2Sell

I received an email from a client with a vacant house last week worrying about this issue because of a blast of cold arctic air that is supposed to drop temperatures into the teens and stay near freezing for a few days.

Rather than having him turn on the utilities, we suggested he have the property winterized. Locally, we often use Mark Kissee of Kissee Inspections to handle this process for our clients. Winterization usually costs less than $150 (a bit more if there is a pool or a really large house) in our market. This is far less than the time and expense of having the utilities turned back on.

Worried about your vacant house? Winterize it!

Tom Branch, Broker, CDPE, SFR