Preparation for Hurricane

Hi, Eric Wetherington here, I am with New Heights Property Management. Today, I am going to tell you, how to get ready for hurricane season when you own rental properties. Well, there are a couple of tips, we can share with you and what we do to make sure that we are ready for the season.

First of all, we would like to remind all our owners that there are some basic things to remember during hurricane season. First and foremost, we are always concerned about the safety and security of individuals. Whether those are our tenants living in the property, our owners, and certainly our team members here at our company. So the safety and security of those individuals will always come first. If there is an evacuation order when a storm is coming our way, then people are going to evacuate. Then we are going to take steps that are necessary to make sure that people are safe.

How do we make sure that tenants help us and we help them, to prepare your rental properties in case of a storm? What we do is we reach out to our tenants well in advance and ask them to go around their house outside and move inside anything that could become a flying object. That can be any furniture, any yard ornaments, or anything like that, we ensure that all those things are moved inside the structure, so nothing gets blown around and ends up breaking windows and doors. When it comes to safety, some owners ask us about things like boarding up windows and doors. Because there are people living inside those properties, we cannot board up windows and doors, put hurricane shutters up, or do those kinds of things. We cannot do that because any of those things that will be put up will immediately become a safety hazard to the people who are occupying that rental property. So we just don’t do that. 

After the storm, how do we communicate? First of all, we reach out to everybody to make sure that everybody is safe and everybody is okay. Then, we immediately go into figuring out what damage may have been done to the property and figure out what we can do to repair that damage, to mitigate any further damage that might be caused.  We work with a great team of vendors here in the greater Charleston area, they like us and do a lot of business with us. They know that they are to be ready to help us with all the properties that we have in case of storms. 

If you own the rental properties and you need to make sure that you have a good list of vendors who are reliable and will come to help you when your property needs help after a storm.  Make sure that you are careful about vendors who come in from other parts of the country. Unfortunately, there are some folks who like to come into a storm area. They either charge exorbitant rates or they will tell you that they are going to do some repairs. However, they just disappear with your money and repairs never happen. So, be very careful to whom you pay to fix your property after the storm. 

If you have any questions about preparing for a storm or preparing for a hurricane season. Please feel free to reach out to us here at New Height Property Management. We will be happy to share with you any ideas or information we can about your rental property. Thank you and have a great day.

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