A hidden expense to owning a home is the combination of preventative maintenance tasks and smaller fix it and repair tasks. These costs include buying replacement parts and materials where the homeowner does the installation work themselves or the cost to hire a service contractor to do the maintenance and repairs. When a contractor performs the work, the costs will include parts, materials, and labor.
Preventative Maintenance
Preventative maintenance costs include buying air filters, caulking, weather stripping, fire extinguishers, carbon monoxide detectors and all the necessary tools to do the work such as power tools, ladders, hand tools, and landscaping tools. Some preventative maintenance costs are more suited to hiring a contractor such as cleaning the inside and outside windows, pruning large trees, cleaning out a chimney, and cleaning out the dryer vent duct.
Repair Costs
Fix it and repair costs also have both outside contractor costs, as well as, parts and materials costs. One example is replacing worn out toilet parts that is generally performed by homeowners. Examples of repair projects usually completed by outside contractors include fixing broken gutters, roof tiles, and replacing garage door springs that break. Tracking all these costs is important to understand the true cost of owning your home.
Overall Maintenance and Repair Costs Tracking
HomeZada has launched a new report that shows homeowners the overall maintenance and repair costs for their house over years. This is very valuable because most consumers stay in their current home for 5 to 7 years. It is an important financial aspect to see the trends of these costs over multiple years. All homes are a collection of multiple building materials, equipment, appliances, finishes and fixtures that have a useful life. So as a home gets older, it is natural to see increasing maintenance and repair costs.
The new multi-year maintenance costs report in HomeZada is based on marking recurring and one time fix it tasks as “complete”, entering in a date it was completed, and entering in the total actual cost for that task. HomeZada customers can also upload photos, invoices, and receipts for these tasks. The new report instantly gives you financial visibility over multiple years in terms of how much maintenance and repairs you spending on your home.
HomeZada also has a maintenance cost report that you can filter by a specific year. This allows you to focus on any previous year and to see the trends over the course of all 12 months to see the financial impact.
Financial Visibility
This valuable data can help you save money by giving your financial visibility to increase the tasks you do yourself which tends to be much cheaper versus hiring a contractor. HomeZada’s new multi-year maintenance trend cost report also helps you to decide if it is time to sell your home. Because you don’t want to deal with increasing maintenance and repair costs to own the current home, you may use this report to determine when to sell.
To get started managing your maintenance costs and tasks, sign up for HomeZada today.
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