Home warranty for Single family home rental?

Question

Is purchasing a home warranty a good idea for a single family home rental property?

Bill B. · Answer

Please just click on the magnifying glass in upper right. This is literally asked monthly if not weekly. It’s a bad deal for your home, but a horrible idea for rentals. What you’ll find is they’re happy to take your money until something breaks. If it’s a cheap thing you’ll pay enough in deductibles/service charges/labor so they can still make money. If it’s a big thing like an ac unit in vegas. They’ll come out in a couple days to look at it, then go back to the shop to order the part they’ll have in a couple days. So that when they get it in a couple more days, they can come out in a couple more days to fix it. Same is true of furnaces in the winter. Their hope being you’ll get sick of paying for the hotel room for your tenant and simply go with someone else out of your pocket.   instead we come out of pocket $150-$300 and have it fixed in 2 hours.

I assume 90% of home warranties are purchase by home sellers that are then given to home buyers to “make them feel good” and not renewed.

Zambricki Li · Answer

Case by case. I've seen it worth it on expensive home though never done it with a rental property.

Bud Gaffney · Answer

@Peter J Struck no. Warranties are for the 🐦s

Ken Dunn · Answer

@Peter J Struck - I have first hand experience with home warranties and do NOT recommend them. I bought 2 4-plex properties in north DFW in Jan last year. They had a lot of deferred maintenance with 4 units sitting vacant. The seller paid half and I paid half for 1 year warranty coverage. I used them several times for AC repairs. Each time a different company came out and some did OK work but others just tried to upsell more repairs or charge about 2-3 what the price for those optional repairs/maintenance (not covered under warranty) should have been. When you place a work order the warranty company sends it out to their list of vendors in the area, whomever jumps first is the company that gets the job. So, you probably will not have the same company back out for follow up work. It also seemed that the companies coming out were just lower quality with lower professional standards. The warranty company was Choice Home Warranty. You can see reviews online. My recommendation is to just save the money you would spend on extended warranty coverage and apply it to hiring a professional service company that you researched and vetted yourself, once you need a repair done.

Hope this helps.

Ken

Kirk Waldron · Answer

Hi Peter,

Great question. Anyone feel free to disagree, but if it were me, I would weigh the age and condition of the house as part of the consideration. I would also try to discover if the basement was finished by a licensed professional vs a rookie who doesn't know the ins and outs of DIY. I wonder if you can see if a permit was submitted to the city to have any work done?

If the house is so old that it has ancient pipes that have never been serviced, or massive trees all around the house that could have roots burrowing into them, etc, etc. Then a warranty might be good. If it was built in the last 15 years and the owners lived there, i might not feel one is necessary. Im sure some folks are buying peace of mind no matter what the house looks like, which can be priceless. Just food for thought.

John Morgan · Answer

No, don’t ever get those things. When my AC breaks down, I want somebody out there to fix it today. Not next week. I’ve heard mostly bad stories about home warranties.

Adam Martin · Answer

I always get one for a year for new purchases.  I have had one on rentals before as well and I renewed one for 3 years on one of my properties where the hvac system was old hoping they would replace it.  They just put a bandaid on each time until the condenser coils needed replaced due to corrosion but they tried to say it could be cleaned which was my responsibility, they were out at least once a year.  I dropped them immediately and just replaced it realizing by the time I kept paying service fees I and premiums I could have had a new system.  Service companies aren't hurting for business and wanting to take their low rates so it was a full time job trying to stay on top of them to expedite service due to no heat in February and no AC in the middle of summer with a baby in the house.  It was also not great for the tenants and I spent a lot of time and energy in the claims.  In theory it is a great idea however in practice I'm not so sure.

Home warranty for Single family home rental?

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