What Is Home Watch, and What Do You Call Someone Who Looks After Your House?
Home watch means someone visits your empty house on a schedule and tells you how it looks. Here are the other names for it, and the ones that mean something else.
Home watch is a service where someone visits your house on a schedule while you're away, checks that everything is as you left it, and tells you what they found. Nobody moves in. The person doing it might be called a home watcher or a house checker, and some people describe the job instead, searching for "someone to check on my house". If that's what you're after and the house is in Regina, we do home watch in Regina.
Words that usually mean this service
You'll see several names for the same thing, and companies pick whichever they like.
House watching
This is one of the more common searches in Canada, alongside "house watching service". "House watch" means the same thing, though a search for it will also turn up the TV show.
House check or house checking
This describes the visit itself. A house check is one trip through your home, and a house checking service is a business that does them. We use this wording a lot, since it says what happens.
Someone to look after my house
This isn't a trade term, but it's how some people ask. If you have searched for someone to keep an eye on the house, or to pay someone to check on a house in Saskatchewan, home watch is the name of what you were looking for.
Words that mean something else
Several similar terms point to a different kind of help. Knowing them will save you a phone call.
House sitter
A house sitter stays in your home for the length of your trip. Our article on house sitting and home watch compares the two and helps you pick.
Home check or home inspection
"Home check" can mean home watch, but it's also used for a home inspection, the once-over someone pays for when buying a house. An inspector writes up the building's condition on one visit. A home watch service keeps coming back to make sure nothing has changed. If a listing talks about foundations and buyers, it's an inspector.
Home monitoring
This usually means alarms and cameras. Those report on what a sensor picks up, and nobody walks through the house. We don't offer them. They can sit alongside a visit schedule, and a monitored low temperature alarm is one of the options in Saskatchewan Mutual's policy wording.
Property management
A property manager deals with tenants, leases and rent. A home watch service looks after a house that's empty. We don't handle tenants or leases at all.
What someone actually does
On a typical visit we walk around the outside looking for damage, then go through the inside looking for leaks, pests and anything out of the ordinary. We check the heating, cooling and plumbing. We can also flush toilets, run faucets, bring in the mail and adjust the light timers. You get a report after every visit, and if something's wrong, we contact you with photos and details. Our article on what a house check includes and what it costs goes through a visit step by step.
Who hires someone for this
Home watch suits a few kinds of owner:
- Snowbirds who spend the winter somewhere warm and leave the house behind
- People travelling for work who will be out of town for weeks at a time
- Anyone on a long trip, once it's long enough that a problem could go unnoticed
- Owners of a seasonal or second home that sits empty for part of the year
- Owners of a vacant house that nobody is living in right now
Insurance is often what starts the search. Home policies can have rules about how long a house can sit empty and how often someone has to go in, so a call to a broker can end with being told someone has to check on it. Our article on how often someone should check an empty house looks at what insurers say. Keep in mind that your insurer has to confirm whether any visit schedule meets your policy.
What it costs
At Peggy's, a visit every two weeks is $129 a month, a weekly visit is $219 a month, and two visits a week are $349 a month. A single visit is $69. Those are Canadian dollars before GST, and the rest is on our pricing page.
Finding someone near you
Search for "home watch" with your city's name, then ask whoever you find what a visit covers, how they'll report back and how they handle your key. We work in two cities: see home watch in Saskatoon, or read about our house checks in Regina and send us your dates.
Need Help Preparing Your Home?
Let Peggy's Home Watch professionals ensure your home is properly prepared for your winter vacation.
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