Some home builders offer a special homeowner portal so that their customers can easily stay in touch and access important data. While anyone can access much of the company’s information through their website, the homeowner portal is a password-protected site that only customers can access. It’s an incredibly useful feature.

Learn more about what you can do with Sterling’s homeowner portal.

Connect to Your Builder

In general, the homeowner portal is ideal because it helps you stay connected to your builder. You can easily see the latest contact information, and the builder can instantly send personalized information directly to their customers. For instance, they might use the portal to make an announcement that the water company is doing planned maintenance in the neighbourhood, and residents on certain streets may have no access to water during that time.

Watch Your Home Be Built

Initially, the fun part of the homeowner portal is getting updates on the status of your home build. You can see a schedule of when they’ll pour the foundation, paint the walls, and lay down the flooring. As they finish each step, you’ll get a notification that the work’s been done. If you’re the type of person who loves driving by the house to watch it go up, you’re going to appreciate this feature.

Keep Your Paperwork Organized

Disorganized people can rejoice! Inside the homeowner portal, you’ll find all of the paperwork associated with your home. No more messy file folders! This includes things like the original purchase agreement, information on your new home warranty (and other warranties), and the notes on your colour choices. If you’re standing in a store thinking about purchasing an area rug, but you can’t remember the exact colour of your walls, you can instantly look it up. You can also easily look up warranty information years from now. You’ll never have to argue with your spouse over who misplaced the paperwork again.

Look Up the Community Guidelines

Most communities have specific guidelines about how the exterior of a home and the landscaping surrounding it should look. If you want to make changes to the original design, you’ll need to consult the guidelines. This might apply if you want to add a walkway in the front, put up a fence in the back for your dog, or plant a new tree. Luckily, the community guidelines should be in your homeowner portal. If you still have questions about what is and is not allowed, you can talk to the builder.

Get Maintenance Updates

One of the most useful features of the homeowner portal is the maintenance updates. Throughout the lifetime of your home, you’ll need to maintain certain things, and if you forget, you could void the warranty. The alerts in your portal will remind you to do things like schedule a furnace cleaning and test the GFCI outlets. It’s all on a monthly calendar, so you can easily look ahead.

Request Warranty Work

In a brand-new home, things aren’t likely to break down, but when they do, they may be covered by the warranty. When your builder has a homeowner portal, it becomes easy for you to put in a request for warranty-related work. You can upload photos of the problem along with your request. It’s just easier to handle the work this way instead of trying to figure out who to call. When you submit your request through the portal, it goes to just the right person.

Contact Companies for Maintenance or Repairs

Sterling works with a variety of suppliers to give your home the look you want. Many of these companies provide regular maintenance for the items they’ve installed, so you probably want to work directly with those companies. Many years down the road, you may want to replace the carpets or windows, and having a good connection to a local company can be helpful. Your homeowner portal can connect you directly with the businesses responsible for windows, flooring, lighting, landscaping, and more. You can easily call that company and work with them again.

Why You Want a Homeowner Portal

You can store your builder’s phone number in your phone, tuck all of your paperwork into a special file, and use Google to look up most of the information you need, but a homeowner portal provides you with more convenience than any of these things. It gathers all of this information in a single spot that’s easy to access. It’s all online, so you’re not taking up storage in your home or on your computer. Best of all, the information inside your homeowner portal is updated in real time. You don’t have to do the work yourself. Look for a builder that provides this important feature.

At Sterling Homes, we’re proud of the homeowner portal that we offer, and we think that you’ll agree that it’s one of the best. Come take a tour of our homes and ask the Area Manager what our homeowner portal can do for you.

Photo credits: woman, tablet