Preparing Your Snowbird Property for the Summer Off-Season

Closing up a Highland Beach property for the summer is not like locking a northern house for a few months. A vacant home here sits through the hottest, wettest, most storm-prone half of the year with nobody inside to notice anything going wrong. Almost every unpleasant discovery in October traces back to something not done in May.

The thermostat decision, which people get backwards

This is the most consequential item on the list. The instinct is to switch the air conditioning off entirely, or set it very high, to avoid paying to cool an empty house. It is also how people come home to mold on the walls and inside the closets.

Your air conditioner is the primary means of removing humidity from the house. Turn it off for a Florida summer and the interior becomes warm and saturated, which is precisely the condition organic material needs to grow. The cost of running the system moderately is trivially small next to remediation and replacing drywall and cabinetry.

Leave it running at a moderate setting rather than off. A humidistat or a smart thermostat with a humidity setting is a genuinely worthwhile investment for a seasonal property, because it lets the system respond to moisture rather than temperature alone. Leave interior doors and closet doors open so conditioned air circulates everywhere rather than only the hallway.

Water: the failure that runs for four months

A supply line that lets go in June will run continuously until someone opens the door in October. Turn the water off at the main. Then run the faucets to drain the lines, and switch off the water heater at the breaker so it is not heating an empty tank all summer.

Pour a little water into rarely used drains and traps before you leave. A trap that dries out lets sewer gas into the house, which is the smell people describe when they return.

Storm readiness while you are away

Bring in or secure everything outdoors: patio furniture, planters, the grill, hoses, decorative items. Clear the gutters, downspouts and any deck drains so a heavy band has somewhere to send water. Trim back anything that could reach the house in wind. Check that shutters or panels operate, and that whoever is handling the property has access to them and knows how.

Take photographs of the interior and the exterior before you leave. If you ever need to make a claim, documented condition is worth a great deal.

Somebody has to actually look at it

The most valuable thing on this entire list is arranging for a real person to walk through the property periodically. A remote sensor tells you the temperature. It does not notice a stain spreading across a ceiling, a lizard in the lanai, a dripping angle stop or a screen that has torn.

Book any repairs you already know about for the spring rather than deferring them to the fall. It is far easier to fix a small thing before four months of heat and humidity work on it.