Flip was broken into, more lessons learned

[Jason McDougall]

Good morning BP,

I went to my flip project this morning to find one of the front windows shattered. When I went inside the house, I found the brick that they used to break it, and also noticed that the back door was open. Other than the window and screen, nothing was damaged, but some of my contractors tools were stolen, to the tune of about $5000. He usually packs them up each night, but he loaded up trash and debris from the job last night so he could take it to the dump this morning, and left his tools in the house. He has insurance, and I've offered to pay his deductible towards the claim. I guess this is one of those unexpected expenses that comes out of the miscellaneous part of my project budget. 

Lessons learned, always strongly suggest to your contractors that they pack up their tools each night, and also add something to your contract disclaiming that you aren't responsible for theft of any tools that are left behind at the end of each day. In my case, I have a great working relationship with my contractor, so I want to cover his deductible to make sure we maintain that. Also, make sure that your contractor doesn't let anybody look at the house without your permission. An interested buyer might really be somebody that's up to no good. And lastly, leave some lights on! It might not do anything, but maybe it's just enough to make a vandal think that someone is working late at night on the house, and deter them from breaking in.

This all came as a surprise to me since this house is in a great neighborhood, and we'll be listing it for $180k. This kind of stuff just doesn't happen very often in this area, so please be cautious and don't think that it won't happen to you.

Does anybody have any recommendations for a mobile alarm system? I would think that there has to be some sort of alarm system that you could move from house to house. Monitored or un-monitored, app integration on a smart phone, something like that.