An Easy Way to Handle Appliance Repairs in Your Detroit Area Rental Properties
Both DTE Energy and Consumers Energy offer “Appliance Service Plans” that can make life easy for do-it-yourself property owners in the metro Detroit area.
You’ve filled your latest vacancy, got the tenant in with all the necessary documents & disclosures signed and everything should just be on auto-pilot from here on out, right?
Wrong!
Murphy’s Law says you now get one of those dreaded calls about the fridge or a/c unit suddenly not working.
This is rarely an easy maintenance call to handle. Plugged sewers, leaky faucets and even broken garbage disposals are usually pretty standard to deal with.
Appliance issues can be very tricky.
Just getting a repairman to the property can easily cost $100 or more in a service call fee.
If you get these calls, hopefully they’re all just blown fuses or a loose wire somewhere.
If they’re not, it can get expensive very quickly to determine what’s wrong with the appliance and get a decent quote to repair it. Often, the cost of the repair makes it very attractive to just buy a new appliance.
Lucky for you, there is an affordable alternative.
Both major utility companies in the Detroit area, offer inexpensive Appliance Service Plans for rental properties.
So, if you get a call from a tenant for an appliance issue, you can just call the plan’s 800 number, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and they will send someone to the property to address the issue.
I don’t recommend giving you tenant the 800 #, as you should maintain some control. But, you can direct the repair person to contact the tenant to schedule the service call.
Now the plans are not perfect. They do have limitations where if it costs more to repair an appliance than to replace it, they will issue a certain amount of credit towards the replacement purchase.
The beauty of the plans though, is the amount of time it saves you in trying to find a reasonable repair person and the quick response time your tenant(s) experience. No more upset tenants as you spend several days making phone calls trying to find a repair person that’s not going to gouge you.
The cost of these programs start at $10.99/month. Note: a minimum 1 year contract is required.
I highly recommend checking out both programs and paying special attention to what they don’t cover and what happens if an appliance can’t be fixed or costs too much to fix.
Here are the links to both programs:
DTE Energy – http://www.hppservices.com/
Consumers Energy – https://www.applianceserviceplan.com/
As always, if managing your own properties in the Detroit metro area gets to be too much for you or you just want to spend you time finding more properties to acquire, contact us to manage your properties for you!