The Successful Landlord Blog

This post was inspired by Cliff over at ChangingMyDirection.com who recently made a post about American Home Shield and why they don’t do their job and/or are lame in general.

My experience with companies like this is not far off the mark from Cliff’s experience. In this arena, my favorite company to hate is East Coast Mechanical or ECM as they like to call themselves. Their service area includes the lower half of Florida’s east coast and are based in Boynton Beach, FL.

I should mention that my experience was a while back when I owned some vacation rental property in Florida which sat empty most of there year due to the hot weather south Florida is known for.

At the time, I was living WAY out of town in Anchorage, Alaska (a whole other story) and was in need of a company to do repairs on the major appliances should something stop functioning while a tenant was in residence. Sure enough, the washing machine failed mostly because it was about 20-years old, but then that’s what mechanical insurance is for, right? Wrong! Not when you buy it from East Coast Mechanical.

First off, these jokers would come out and ring the doorbell, decide that no one was home and not bother to call anyone to let them know. This is after I had informed their customer service people that the property was vacant and the technician would have to drive a big THREE BLOCKS to get the key in order to gain access. But no, they couldn’t wrap their heads around that one.

Then, when they finally get access to the property, they said that they would have to order a part and the whole show-up-and-find-the-unit-unoccupied-then-leave game began again.

Finally, I figured that these idiots clearly did not intend to uphold their end of the contract and decided to cancel whereupon I was informed that even though ECM did not perform as advertised, I was not entitled to a refund of the remaining insurance premium. WTF?!

I mean, COME ON. I’m sure that not all companies in this industry behave like this but the more I hear these stories, the more I am convinced that this is the norm.

Also, I asked a Realtor I know about American Home Shield and she mentioned that she uses AHS because they have a partnership agreement with Re/Max. I guess at times, a warranty like this just helps the deal to go through….as long as you never have to use it.

Well folks, it`s the beginning of a new year and I, for one, am glad for it. I have to say that last year started out OK but ended not so well and I think that the economy/housing market had a lot to do with that. From what I understand, this year is supposed to get worse economically but I feel hopeful that things will improve by the end of the year.

So, in the spirit of the new year, I have changed the “skin” of LANDLORD-SUCCESS.COM for a couple of main reasons.

First, I was getting completely sick of looking at the design of the last skin. It was designed for computer screens running at 800×600 resolution and really, does anyone even still run at that resolution? A quick check of my site stats says that out of the last year, only about 7% of the users had a screen resolution of 800×600. The new blog skin will work well with any screen resolution you choose.

Second, the new skin gives me more screen “real estate” to work with (excuse the pun.) This extra space will allow me more flexibility to do some things that I’ve been wanting to do for a while with the site like improve usability and some other neat features. Stay tuned.

As always, your comments and suggestions much are appreciated. If there is anything that is super annoying to you on the site, please don’t hesitate to let me know. This does not include the obnoxious little “landlord” character at the top of the screen.

He’s only there temporarily until I can find some nicer artwork that matches the general look of the blog.

Enjoy!