Most Homeowners Would Benefit From an Estate Manager

Imagine somebody showed up at your house tomorrow morning and said, “I’m your estate manager. What would you like me to take care of first?”

What would you say?

Don’t think about it too hard. There’s probably already something. Maybe it’s the gutter cleaning you’ve been meaning to schedule. Maybe it’s the bathroom fan that sounds like it’s trying to escape from the ceiling. Maybe it’s the crack you photographed six months ago because you wanted to see if it got bigger, except now you can’t remember where the photo is. Maybe it’s that one door that doesn’t close quite right and hasn’t closed quite right for three years because, somehow, figuring out who fixes a door has never made it to the top of the list.

Or maybe you wouldn’t give your estate manager a repair at all.

Maybe you’d hand them a folder.

Here are the appliance warranties. Here are some receipts. I think this company serviced the HVAC. Somebody repaired the roof before we bought the house. The previous owner said something about the sump pump. I’m pretty sure the water heater is getting old. There’s a guy named Mike in my phone who fixed something important, but I have absolutely no idea what his last name is.

Figure out what I need to know.

That might be the first assignment.

And that got us wondering.

What would homeowners actually hand over if everybody suddenly had an estate manager?

So we went looking.

Apparently, we’re all running our houses on “vibes and panic”

We spend a lot of time thinking about houses at Potomac Lux. But we wanted to know how other homeowners actually keep track of theirs. Not how a home-maintenance website says you’re supposed to do it. Not the beautifully organized binder somebody assembled for a photograph. How do regular people, with jobs and children and groceries and a thousand other things competing for their attention, actually manage all the stuff that comes with owning a home?

The answers were wonderful.

And slightly terrifying.

One homeowner on Reddit said they have a Notes file called “house shit.”

It gets updated maybe twice a year.

Their system for everything else?

“Vibes and panic.”

Another keeps printed receipts in a folder labeled “house stuff.” If something isn’t in the folder, their assessment of the situation is wonderfully concise:

“I’m screwed.”

And another homeowner described their home-management system perhaps more accurately than any software company ever could:

“I lay in bed at night and fret, mostly.”

That one made us laugh.

Then it stopped being quite so funny, because the more homeowners we listened to, the more versions of the same story we found.

People have spreadsheets they forget to update. Calendar reminders they swipe away. Manuals in drawers. Contractor information buried in text messages. Warranties somewhere in their email. Photos of problems mixed in with pictures of their kids, vacations and whatever they happened to eat last Thursday. Somebody knows when the HVAC was serviced, but that somebody may be the technician who serviced it.

And then there is all the information that exists nowhere at all.

When was that repaired? Who did it? Was there a warranty? What kind of filter does this thing take? When are we supposed to service it again? Was that crack there when we moved in? Did we ever fix that leak, or did it just stop raining?

Nobody knows.

The house isn’t keeping track.

You are.

Nobody tells you that you’re about to become the manager of a very complicated object

Buying a home is strange when you think about it.

You can spend months finding one. There are agents, lenders, inspectors, appraisers, title companies, insurance companies and enough paperwork to make you question several of your life choices. People measure things. Photograph things. Inspect things. Sign things. Explain things. You finally make it through closing, somebody gives you the keys and everybody congratulates you.

And then they leave.

Congratulations.

This is yours now.

Along with the bedrooms and the backyard, you have apparently acquired responsibility for a collection of roofing, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, drainage, appliances, trees, masonry, paint, caulk, filters, pumps, valves and mechanical equipment that you may know absolutely nothing about.

Nobody comes with the house.

That’s the weird part.

If you own a large enough estate, of course, somebody actually might.

An estate manager keeps an eye on the property. They know what needs attention. They coordinate the people working on it. They keep records. They follow up. They remember the things the homeowner shouldn’t have to remember.

The homeowner doesn’t necessarily need to know whether the strange spot above the window requires a roofer, carpenter, plumber, mason or somebody else entirely.

That’s somebody else’s problem.

And once you understand what an estate manager actually does, it becomes difficult not to ask a very obvious question:

Why is that level of help reserved for estates?

A regular house still has a roof.

It still has plumbing.

Things still break.

And its owner probably has better things to do on Saturday morning than spend three hours figuring out which species of contractor fixes a mysterious wet spot above a window.

“Who do I call?”

This may be our favorite homeowner question because it contains almost the entire problem in four words.

Not, “How do I repair this?”

Just:

Who do I call?

We found homeowners asking exactly that. Something becomes loose, leaking, cracked, humming, sagging or otherwise starts behaving in a way that houses generally should not behave, and suddenly the homeowner has a new assignment.

First, figure out what the thing is.

Then figure out whether it matters.

Then figure out who handles it.

One homeowner we found had a loose porch column. General contractors considered the project too small. Handymen weren’t comfortable taking it on. The homeowner wasn’t even sure whether the problem was structural.

Think about how ridiculous that situation feels from the homeowner’s side.

There is something wrong with my house.

I would like to pay a qualified person to fix the thing that is wrong with my house.

Please tell me which person.

That homeowner wasn’t looking for another DIY tutorial.

They needed somebody to help figure out what happens next.

That is a very different problem.

And it happens all the time.

The internet has given homeowners access to nearly unlimited information. What it hasn’t necessarily given us is judgment. You can read twenty articles about cracks in drywall and still have absolutely no idea whether your crack matters. You can find 400 contractors and still not know which one you should call. You can download a 75-item annual maintenance checklist and somehow finish reading it feeling considerably worse than when you started.

More information isn’t always the answer.

Sometimes you just need somebody who knows what to do next.

Now imagine the house with an estate manager

Something changes when you imagine handing all of this to somebody else.

Your relationship with the house becomes different.

You notice something.

You don’t start with Google.

You start with your home.

“What’s this?”

And instead of beginning from zero, there is context. The history of the house is there. The work that has already been done doesn’t disappear into old emails. The person who repaired something two years ago doesn’t vanish into your contacts under “Mike plumber maybe.” The receipt is connected to the work in a Home Record. The photograph means something. The warranty can actually be found when you need the warranty.

If something needs attention six months from now, you don’t have to remember it for six months.

The house remembers.

If something doesn’t need to be fixed today but should become a Watch Item, it doesn’t have to live somewhere in the back of your mind competing with school pickup, work, dinner and everything else happening in your life.

It can simply be watched.

And when something really does need to be handled, you don’t begin from nothing.

You have somewhere to start.

That’s the part of an estate manager that we think almost every homeowner could use.

Not somebody following you around the house in white gloves.

Somebody keeping an eye on things.

Your house should know its own story

There is another part of this that becomes increasingly ridiculous the longer you think about it.

Your car has a service history.

A mechanic can look at it and tell you its mileage, what was replaced, what service is approaching and sometimes what happened to it before you even owned it.

Your home may be worth ten or twenty times as much.

Ask when the roof was replaced.

“2018?”

Who did it?

“No idea.”

What shingles did they use?

“No idea.”

Is there a warranty?

“Maybe?”

We can do better than this.

A house should accumulate knowledge as it ages, not lose it.

When something gets repaired, that repair should become part of the story of the home. The photograph should stay with it. So should the receipt. The contractor. The appliance. The warranty. The Maintenance Interval. The thing you’re keeping an eye on.

Because five years from now, somebody is going to ask a question about that house.

It would be nice if the house knew the answer.

So we decided to do something about it.

We originally went looking for these stories because we wondered whether other homeowners were struggling with the same things we were.

They are.

And after reading enough of them, something became increasingly clear.

Homeowners don’t need another list of contractors. They don’t need another enormous maintenance checklist. And they probably don’t need another place to put information they’ll eventually forget to look at.

They need something keeping an eye on the house.

Something that remembers what was done. Something that helps make sense of what may need attention. Something that keeps the people, projects and history connected. And somewhere to turn when their entire understanding of the situation is:

“Something’s wrong over there.”

In other words, most of us could use an estate manager.

So that’s what we’re building Potomac Lux to become.

An estate manager for your home.

And you don’t have to wait for some distant future to start using it that way.

You can bring us the thing you’ve been putting off. The problem you don’t understand. The project you don’t know how to begin. The professional you don’t know how to find. The maintenance you’re not sure matters yet.

Start there.

Behind that experience, we’re building something larger.

A home that remembers.

A clearer picture of what has happened, what needs attention and what may be coming next.

A better way to connect the problem, the right professional, the work that was done and the history that should remain after everybody goes home.

But all of that starts with something remarkably simple.

Your house needs something.

And instead of wondering what the hell you’re supposed to do about it, you have somewhere to turn.

That part is already here.

So we’ll leave you with the question we started with.

If you had an estate manager for your home today, what’s the first thing you’d hand them?

Whatever just popped into your head?

Start there.