What are the best ways to protect and secure vacant and distressed investment properties?
REO/foreclosure and short-sale property investors know that vacant property can be a magnet for trouble – attracting thieves, vandals, squatters, drug users, and even kids. Here are a few ways to secure and protect your property.
- Secure the vacant property with steel door and window guards: Make it hard to get in by ensuring doors and windows are covered with DAWGS door and window guards.
- Monitor and maintain the exterior: Check on your vacant property frequently to make sure it’s secure. Prune shrubs away from windows and keep the lawn tidy.
- Remove any flammable debris around the structure, including construction materials, dead vegetation, paper, and other material.
- Light the property – at night and during the day. Make sure your property has working exterior lighting, either on a motion sensor or a timer. In addition, have a few lights on timers inside the property to help it make it look like someone is there.
- Make friends with the neighbors – your neighbors are an extra set of eyes. Give them contact information, yours or your property manager’s, to call regarding any suspicious activity.
- Carry insurance: Vacant properties and properties being renovated still need insurance coverage, to protect the structures themselves, and your liability as a property owner. You may need a builder’s risk policy that provides coverage for damage to the insured structure and liability coverage during renovation.
DAWGS steel panels are better than board-up because they’re built to keep homes and vacant buildings free of crime and uninvited guests. We take that seriously–we’ve tested our products in some of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago, LA, Ohio, New York and more – and we’ve come out on top. Nothing gets past us, and that means nothing gets to you either. When you go into a property protected by DAWGS, you know that you are guarded by steel, not flimsy plywood.
We’re here to help, and we’re ready to stand guard. Check us out at www.DAWGSinc.com, or give us a call. Our presence is a promise of safety that we hope you’ll take us up on.
