If you are like most of my vacation home clients, you purchased your Disney area vacation home to allow you and your friends to have a place to vacation as well as to make additional income.
After hiring a reputable management company, the biggest way you can ensure that you have a profitable Orlando vacation home is to put controls in place to control your variable monthly expenses.
Here are my top five ways to help save you money on your monthly bills and put more money back into your pocket!
Lighting Controls and LED Bulbs
Many vacation home guests don’t use the same care with lights as they do in their own home. They may leave lights on all the time even when they are gone. One of the best ways to decrease your electric consumption is to install motion sensor light switches in all rooms. This allows the lights to come on either by manually turning them on or by motion. When the sensors don’t detect movement in the room for 15-minutes, they will turn the lights off saving you a lot of money.
Another great tip is to replace all of your existing incandescent and fluorescent lighting with energy efficient LED lights. The price of these gems have come down significantly and will not only save you money on your monthly electric bill but will help curb the cost of bulb replacement over time.
Door Alarms
Many guests, especially in homes that have our door recreational features like swimming pools and play sets, will leave the back door to the home open while they are outside enjoying the Florida warmth. The challenge is that all of that Florida warmth is going into your home making your air conditioning system work harder. This leads to costly electric bills as well as unneeded wear and tear on your air condition system. For just a few dollars you can install a battery powered door alarm on the doors to your home that will sound an annoying, ear piercing alarm whenever the door is left open for a specified period of time. This will ensure that the guests close the door and save you money!
Programmable Wifi Enabled Thermostats
Technology is our friend and in the case of owning a Disney area vacation home, an absolute must! Many guests will crank down that air conditioning to 60-degrees (15-degreed Celsius) and cause your electric bill to soar! By simply installing a programmable, lockable thermostat you can ensure that the guests never set the air conditioning below what you allow. Additionally, many new wifi enabled thermostats will message you and your management company to let them know when they see a spike in energy consumption. This is critical in catching maintenance issues before they become costly emergency repairs.
Lawn Irrigation Controls
In Florida, we use our irrigation systems year round and they are critical to maintaining your curb appeal. We also cut our grass year round in Orlando which means even more of a chance that a mower could break a sprinkler head. We encourage clients to have their irrigation checked monthly by their management companies to ensure that everything is working properly and that all the zones are getting adequate coverage. A broken or clogged sprinkler head could cost you a lot of money in wasted water and dead grass.
Consolidate Your Technology Services
It is no secret that bundling of services can save you a lot of money. From insurance to cable/internet bundles have become all the rage. By bundling your cable, television, and telephone services with one vendor, you can save as much as 60% off your bills if you had them through different vendors. When buying your Orlando vacation home, your United Real Estate Orlando real estate agent can help point you in the right direction to local companies that are the best value.
BONUS TIP: Swap out conventional televisions for Smart Televisions. These technology masterpieces come with Amazon TV, Apple TV, Netflix, Hulu, and many more services that many of your guests have accounts to. This will offer them even more entertainment options with no added cost to you!
Those are my top 5 tips to help save you money on your monthly bills for your Orlando area vacation home. Effectively managing your expenses will help ensure that you maximize the return on your investment and put more money back into your pocket!