Signs You Need a Cottage Property Manager

Do you need a cottage property manager? You do when the cottage asks for more hours than you can give it from the city. Five signs say so. Your insurer's absence window is shorter than the gap between your visits. The Friday drive up is your only inspection. You keep six trades in your phone. A neighbour checks, and nothing gets written down. An alert has reached you when you couldn't act on it. One or two of these? A monitor or a scheduled visit may be enough. Four or five, and you're already doing a manager's job, unpaid, from 2 hours away.

A Sunday in January, 2 hours from the cottage

Picture a chalet outside Thornbury on a Sunday in January. You locked up after lunch and drove back to the city. It's 11:40 p.m. The furnace stops. Nobody hears it. The rooms start to cool. You're asleep in Toronto.

Without heat, a Georgian Bay winter can freeze the pipes in under 6 hours. When do you find out? Friday, when you open the door. By then the house has spent the week at whatever temperature January chose. Our ChaletGuard page puts one frozen pipe claim at $20,000 to $50,000 in damage. The deductible on top runs $1,000 to $5,000.

Now replay the same Sunday with someone watching. The sensor raises a freeze alert at 5°C. We call you within 15 minutes. Then we call a local contractor and arrange someone to get out there. The pipes don't care where you live. They care how long nobody knew.

That's the first sign in one night: the gap between when something breaks and when anyone hears about it. The other four are the same gap, measured in different ways.

Sign 1: Your visits are further apart than your policy allows

What does your policy say about an empty cottage? Most owners have never read that page. The insurer table on our ChaletGuard page shows how wide the spread is. Wawanesa's threshold is 4 days, with a check every 3 days or a 24/7 monitored alarm. Aviva's is 8 days. Intact's line is that coverage is void if the heat is turned off.

Are your February weekends two weeks apart? Then the math doesn't close, and no amount of careful closing fixes it. Our guide on how often to check a cottage in winter for insurance walks through the schedules.

Read your own clause. Ask your broker what counts as a check. The ruling is theirs, not ours. What we can give you is continuous temperature monitoring and timestamped inspection reports with dated photos.

Sign 2: The Friday drive up is your inspection

Start with the Friday question. Is the heat on? Did anything freeze? If the only way to answer is to drive up and open the door, the drive is the inspection. It is also the last one to arrive.

A drip under the kitchen sink that started on Tuesday has had the whole week by the time you meet it. An ice dam has had the whole week too. You find them with the car still running and the weekend already spent.

A home watch service puts a visit on the calendar instead of the drive. On our Watch + Care plan, we visit your property every two weeks. The inspection report carries timestamped photos and a 30-point checklist. You still drive up. You just stop driving up to find out.

Sign 3: You keep six trades in your phone under "cottage"

Count them. The person who opens the water in spring. The dock crew in May. The dock crew again before the ice. Whoever drains and closes the place in the fall. The snow contractor for the laneway. The plumber, for whatever breaks in between.

That's six names, six calls, six invoices. Each one books on its own calendar. Each one needs a key, a code or you standing there. Our price list has those pieces one at a time: $399 for a standard chalet spring opening, $449 for its fall closing, $299 for a dock installation and $349 for a dock removal.

Is the real cost the invoices? Partly. The bigger cost is that nobody answers for the whole cottage. The dock goes in crooked and the closing crew blames the dock crew. Who sorts it out? You do, from the city, on a Wednesday.

That is the job cottage property management takes off your list. Trades coordination and scheduling are part of our Watch + Care plan, along with bi-weekly property inspections.

Sign 4: A neighbour has the key and nothing gets written down

Can a neighbour just check it? Sometimes, yes. A neighbour who walks through often in winter is worth a lot. The trouble starts when an adjuster asks for the record. "They looked in on it" is not a dated report. Neither is a text that says "all good."

Ask your neighbour three questions before you count on them:

• Will you go inside? Not just look from the laneway.
• Will you send dated photos? Of the thermostat, the water heater and under the sinks.
• Will you still go in March? Even the week you're away yourself.

A no to any of those is the sign. The exception is real. A neighbour who does all three, every time, may be all the cover you need. Keep their photos in one folder, by date.

Sign 5: An alert reached you, and you couldn't do anything

An alert on your phone tells you something is wrong. On its own, it puts nobody at the door. Have you already watched a notification land in the middle of the night and lain awake waiting for morning? That's the sign. The phone did its half of the job. There was no second half.

A cottage monitoring system with people behind it closes that gap. Our ChaletGuard sensors run on their own cellular connection, with a 3-day battery backup when the power goes. After an alert, we call you within 15 minutes and coordinate the fix. Don't rely on Wi-Fi alone at a seasonal place: a power outage takes the router down too.

Three signs you need less than a manager

Some owners reading this don't need a property manager at all. Here is who.

• You're up most weekends, all year. You are the inspection, and it happens often. A monitor covers the nights between. Our Watch plan is $59 a month.
• Your problem is guests and bookings. Listings, cleaning turnovers and guest messages are rental management. Our comparison of a cottage caretaker vs property manager sets out that split.
• Your clause wants visits, and visits are all that's missing. Scheduled checks may be the whole answer. Watch + Care adds bi-weekly inspections at $349 a month.

We would rather you buy the smaller plan that fits than the big one that doesn't.

Which plan each sign points to

Commit for 12 months and the $599 sensor installation is waived. Prices are in Canadian dollars, and HST applies.

One number for the whole cottage

Read your clause tonight. Count the trades in your phone. Think back to the last time the drive up was the first anyone knew. If three of the five signs are yours, stop being the coordinator from the city.

Our property management page lists what is included. If your place is near Thornbury, our page on cottage care in Thornbury covers the area. The plans and prices sit on our cottage care pricing page. Plans are month-to-month, with 30 days' notice to cancel. Prefer to talk? Call (437) 595-6275.

Frequently asked questions