Brasskey · Home watch in Kelowna
If your Okanagan home sits empty for part of the year, somebody has to attend it. This is what the category actually offers, what the going interval is, what it costs in this valley, and the questions worth asking before you hand a key to anyone.
Home watch is a scheduled attendance at an unoccupied house by someone acting for the owner. Somebody walks the property on a set interval, looks at the things that fail when nobody is there, and sends a record of what they saw. That is the whole category. Everything else is a difference in who attends, how often, what they are competent to notice, and what they can do about it.
It is worth naming what home watch is not, because the words get used loosely in this valley:
Almost nobody searches for this because they woke up wanting a subscription. There is usually a trigger:
The market answer and the insurer answer are not the same, and it matters.
The insurer answer is set by your policy wording. Depending on the insurer, the unoccupancy clause bites somewhere between four and thirty days in the heating season, and where it requires attendance the stated interval is commonly daily or every three days. Some wordings accept a monitored low-temperature alarm instead, which is usually the cheaper and more reliable route to compliance. The trigger days by insurer are set out here.
The market answer in the Okanagan is that operators advertise anything from a fortnightly drive-past to visits every three days, and the phrase "as required by your insurance" gets used far more often than the underlying wording gets read.
The practical resolution is the one we recommend to owners whether or not they ever buy anything from us: put a monitored alarm on the house to satisfy the clause, then choose an attendance interval that matches the actual risk of your building rather than the number in someone's brochure. An alarm never sleeps and costs a few hundred dollars once. Attendance is what turns an alert into a fixed problem.
Very little of this is published, which makes it hard to compare. As a working guide for the Central Okanagan in 2026:
A walk-through and a photo set from a solo operator or a cleaning company with watch bolted on. Usually no after-hours response and no trade network.
A regular interval with a documented report. Response to an incident is typically a phone call to you, not somebody attending.
Monitored sensors included, documented attendance, a defined emergency authority, a vetted trade network, and a builder who attends. Brasskey sits here.
The gap between the middle band and the top is not the number of visits. It is what happens at 2am on a Sunday in January. In the middle band, you get a phone call and a problem. That is the thing to price.
Ask these of any operator, including us. The answers separate the category quickly.
This is the whole argument for paying more, so here it is in the concrete rather than the abstract.
A watcher photographs a mark on a hall ceiling and sends it to you. You are in Calgary. You now own a decision you cannot make, so you either ignore it or you fly home or you send a roofer who is happy to sell you a roof.
What should arrive instead is this: staining at the hall ceiling, 180mm across, moisture meter reads 11 percent, the same as the wall beside it, so nothing is wet now. Attic hatch opened and photographed. The duct run directly above is unwrapped and the roof deck above that is dry and unmarked. We can wrap that duct in the fall for $600 to $900. Nothing here needs you on a plane.
Same house, same mark, same photograph. The difference is somebody who knows where these buildings actually fail, and who makes nothing on the repair.
Not on the public price list. The roster is capped at eight homes for the season because route density is what keeps the response promise honest, and a capped roster should not sell its cheapest tier out of its scarcest inventory. If a per-visit arrangement is genuinely what suits you, say so and we will name an operator in the valley who does it well. We would rather do that than sell you the wrong thing.
Yes. The Property Record is $1,250, one visit, no retainer and no term. A licensed builder walks the house and documents what is there, envelope, roof, mechanical, moisture readings, grounds, shutoffs and systems, photographed and dated, and installs your monitored sensor suite on the same visit. If you take a tier within ninety days it becomes your intake and is not charged twice.
We serve the whole valley. Homes outside the central Kelowna route carry a distance adjustment quoted to your address before you sign, twenty percent for the near band and thirty five percent for the far band, and we cluster our visits so you are not paying for an empty drive. Once three homes in your area are under care, your adjustment drops one band at renewal.
It is not a substitute for one, it includes one. The monitored sensor suite is installed and included at every tier because for most insurers that is the compliance option they accept outright. What a sensor cannot do is close the main, get a trade through a locked door before morning, or tell you what the water already reached. We supply both halves.
Keys and codes are held under a written protocol, everyone who holds one is vetted and under a confidentiality agreement, and every attendance is logged with a timestamp and photographs, so you always know who was in your home and when. Our vehicles are unmarked and our people wear nothing that announces the house is empty.
Kelowna and the lake · eight homes for the 2026 to 2027 season
A licensed builder spends a day at your home and writes down what is actually there, photographed and dated, and installs your monitored sensor suite while he is there. $1,250, one visit, no retainer and no term. Most owners start here and decide about ongoing care afterwards.