A different tenant, a different house
From October to April a good share of coastal properties changes audience: the winter residents arrive, generally from northern Europe, and settle in for three, four or five months. They do not come for the beach, they come for the climate, and they live inside the house far more than a summer visitor.
That moves every pressure point. In August what fails is the air conditioning. In January it is the heating, the hot water and the damp, three things a summer let almost never tests.
The heating, which nobody has switched on since March
Most of these apartments are heated by the heat pump in the air conditioning or by electric radiators. The former have gone seven months without running in heating mode, and that is exactly where the faults summer never reveals show up.
Running the unit in heating mode one October afternoon, leaving it twenty minutes and listening is the cheapest test there is. If something is wrong, you have a month before the tenant arrives.
Hot water for daily use
A cylinder sized for two people in August, with short showers, does not behave the same when the property is occupied daily for five months and the mains water comes in at twelve degrees instead of twenty-two. The same unit takes longer and runs out sooner.
This is the moment to check it, look at the state of the element and decide whether the capacity still fits. A long-stay tenant who runs out of hot water will say so in the review and, worse, halfway through the contract.
Damp is the problem nobody anticipates
A coastal property occupied in winter concentrates all three sources at once: showers, cooking and laundry dried indoors because it will not dry outside. If ventilation depends on opening windows and it is chilly, nobody opens them.
The February result: mould in the bedroom corner and behind the wardrobes. A bathroom extractor that actually works, a kitchen hood and somewhere sensible to dry clothes prevent most of it. Leaving a dehumidifier is often cheaper than repainting.
What is worth writing down
A long-stay tenant has time to discover everything that does not work. It pays to leave a short note with the essentials: where the stopcock is, where the consumer unit is, how the thermostat is programmed, who to call.
And an inventory with photos on arrival. Five months brings wear, and the April argument is avoided by twenty photos taken in October.
The October check, in one visit
Heat pump in heating mode, cylinder, extractors, window seals, drains and general condition. It is an hour of work done before arrival, not in December with somebody inside.
Same logic as the end-of-season turnaround for holiday lets, with a different aim: this is not about looking presentable for two weeks, it is about surviving five months of daily use.
