Traveling always comes with a little stress, from making sure your travel plans go off without a hitch to worrying about keeping your home safe while you’re away. Home burglaries tend to spike during the summer when many people are on vacation.
If you’ve got a trip coming up, make sure your vacation home security strategies keep your home safe. These tips will not only help ensure the safety of your home while you’re away, but several will be beneficial to keeping you and your home safe when you’re in town.
- Install Security Lighting
Indoor and outdoor security lighting is beneficial all the time, not just when you’re on vacation. Indoor lights ensure you’re never coming home to a dark house and when you’re away, you can put them on timers so would-be burglars or other criminals think someone is home.
Outdoor security lighting will illuminate any areas that would otherwise be in the dark at night, making it difficult for criminals to peek into your windows, break into your home, and lurk around unseen.
You can put outdoor lights on timers or install motion lights.
- Technology to Detect Fires
Sure, smoke detectors can alert you to a fire in your home when you’re there, but what about when you’re away? Technology like video fire detection can detect fires in your home and notify the fire department long before anyone outside your home realizes there is a fire.
- Don’t Broadcast Your Travel Plans
It’s tempting to put your vacation plans on your social media accounts, but avoid doing this. Wait until you come home to post those vacation pictures. Chances are, you don’t really know all of your friends on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter and even the most stringent privacy settings can still leave your vulnerable), so it’s best not to advertise that your home is unattended while your laying on the beach somewhere.
- Check With your Local Law Enforcement Agency
Many local law enforcement agencies have a vacation watch program where you can register with them, let them know when you’ll be on vacation, and if there are any people or cars authorized to be on the property.
As time allows, officers in your area will do a quick check of the outside of your home to make sure everything is as it should be. This is obviously no guarantee that nothing will happen to your home while you’re gone, but it’s a great way to have someone taking a look at your house to make sure nothing looks amiss.
It’s also a deterrent to any would-be criminals who might be watching your house or others in your neighborhood.
- Take Care Of the Yard, Stop the Mail and Newspaper, and Have Someone Take Out the Trash
Basically, you want to make it look like someone is home doing all the normal things you do regularly. Uncut grass, an overflowing mailbox, and trash day without your cans outside are clear signs that a homeowner is on vacation.
If burglars are watching your neighborhood, they’ll look for signs like this. Schedule a neighbor or landscaping company to take care of your yard or shovel snow in the winter and take your trash cans to the street and back in. You can easily stop your mail and newspaper online.
Vacation Home Security Tips to Protect Your Home
Use these vacation home security tips to make sure that you don’t return from your next vacation only to have your mood ruined by a home that’s been burglarized or vandalized. Take care to protect your home while you’re away and you’ll reap the benefits even when you’re not out of town.
If you found these tips helpful, be sure to take a look around at our other posts.
