We have a house in Puerto Rico that we only occupy for about 6 weeks out of the year (in winter).
When we are down there, a friend watches the house here and takes care of our cats. When we are here, my sister-in-law lives about 15 minutes away from the house so she will check on it from time to time.
When we first bought the house, we managed to lock ourselves out. One of the neighbors told us how to break in.
We figured if we aren't there, anyone can break in so we don't keep anything of value in the house. We pretty much have a t.v., a DVD player, & a microwave if they were really desperate. (My sister-in-law has some antique china there because she doesn't have room at her place but not exactly the kind of thing that people would steal.) We have had our screened-in back porch broken into and what was stolen was a fruit picker and a hose. That was the second fruit picker we had stolen.
When we left this year, we moved everything from the back porch into the house. We believe it is just the local kids doing it. We also know if they really want to break into the house, there really isn't anything we can do about-which is why we don't leave anything of real value there.
As for the utilities when we aren't there, we turn off the water and the electricity on everything but the refrigerator. There is no such thing as heat down there.
We thought about renting it out when we aren't there but we really didn't want to deal with that and chose not to.
Cat
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