When you buy a home, at least in this country, some assumptions are made by the bank and your neighbors, and to some extent, by yourself. Your neighbors assume you will maintain the property, particularly the visible bits, in a way that will maintain or increase the value of the home. In some areas, this is enforceable – the city will warn you if you fail at certain maintenance work, such as keeping your lawn and weeds below a specified height, or unrepaired parts of the exterior that are unsightly. More so if your house is in a HomeOwners Assocation (HOA); their rules are stricter.
I don’t have a problem with that concept, it seems a fair part of homeownership and belonging to a neighborhood. I managed to avoid buying a house with an HOA, though I did look at a couple when I was house-hunting. (That was not the deciding factor.) The exterior maintenance I’ve done has really been for my own comfort – the big projects have been improving the ventilation to the attic, adding insulation, and replacing the windows. One of my long term projects is to replace the siding on the house. The current siding is an older style which is no longer produced, so it needs to be fully replaced when it goes.
And therein, we come to the discussion of ethics. Last summer, a hail storm hit the area fairly hard. A good chunk of the neighborhood replaced roofing, siding, or both, as a result of the storm. In the first week after the storm, I had over a dozen companies stop by with business details, offering to inspect both my roof and siding for damage. One was the company that installed my soffits, gutters, and attic insulation; I let them check for damage. After a cursory walk around the house, they reported that they found no new damage.
Here were are, nine months after the incident, and I’m still getting the occasional drive-by visit from companies that want my insurance’s business of repairing the roofing and siding. This last one bugged me. Their flyers – pre-printed – said “YOUR ALUMINUM SIDING and/or ROOF HAVE HAIL DAMAGE! YOUR INSURANCE WILL PAY US TO REPLACE IT WITH BRAND NEW VINYL SIDING!!”. The flyer ends with (still in all caps, and really, I have limits to how much of that I want to see) “You’ve been paying insurance your whole life, now is the time to finally get something back!!” The guy at the door reinforced this – he told me that if he could find even one section that appeared to be damaged from the storm, the insurance would pay to replace all of it.
I’m all for using insurance when something happens that requires it. Health insurance covered the birth of a child and my appendectomy, both of which would have been painfully expensive without insurance. My car insurance came through for me after my accident. But I’m not going to abuse my insurance simply because I want new siding, knowing that there wasn’t significant damage to the siding from that particular storm. I’m also not going to pick a company that reminds me of ambulance chasers to do the work.