Brialle Veldman

Home Warranty Inc

Why is it so important to have a home warranty?

It's really important to have a home warranty, especially for a brand new first-time homeowner that has been renting for five, six years, and they're used to calling their property management company or that owner and saying, hey, my stove doesn't work or my refrigerator's not cooling. And so when you become a homeowner, you become 100% responsible for yourself. So if you don't have a good budget and all of a sudden your refrigerator stops cooling, the technician may come out and say, hey, this is going to be maybe $500 to $1,000 to repair. Are you going to have that money set aside? Most of the time, especially if it happens within the first month of homeownership, they're really crunched for cash.

So it's going to be a really huge burden. Maybe they have to put it on a credit card or put it off. So having that where they only have to pay a small $100 per incident deductible versus paying a full bill is going to pay off itself just because it's always a matter of time when something will fail in the home.

So let's say you open up the refrigerator and it's broke. What's the process from there on how to file a claim and what have you?

You can file a claim online or you can file a claim over the phone. Either way, you can pick your own technician. So we'd have you schedule an appointment with someone. And then once they're at the home, we need two things. It's a diagnosis and an estimate of the cost of repair. And then if it's proved under the warranty terms and conditions, then we let them know, hey, all right, we're going to pay this portion of the bill. The technician can say, hey, we're going to bill the homeowner directly or we're going to go ahead and bill the home warranty company. It's at their discretion. And then we either pay the technician or the homeowner in three to four business days by an e-check or a mail check.