Are Home Warranties Really Worth it?

So what the heck is a home warranty? You've heard all the hype, you've gotta get a home warranty, but what does that mean? There's a lot of different types of home warranties that are out there, and lots of companies that do them.

For instance, did you know that as a seller, you could actually get a home warranty that would warrant everything in your house during the selling process? So let's say your dishwasher breaks, you would pay a simple deductible for like a hundred dollars, and they would come out and they would fix your dishwasher, that's a pretty good deal, right?

It's a possibility if that's something you're interested in, if you are a buyer, this is where we see the majority of our home warranties. They run between six and seven hundred dollars depending on the company and depending on what you get with it, that will cover the house from top to bottom for a year, now this is for usually your major appliances, so refrigerators, A/C unit, water heater- things like that, so if you're buying a house and you don't want a lot of expenses that first year, a home warranty might be the way to go.

There's two different ways to do it, you can buy it as the buyer to protect yourself, or you can ask the seller to buy it for you, we're seeing a little bit more of that as the market has begun to shift and the sellers have less and less power and the buyers are getting a little bit more power back to be able to make some negotiations when it comes to buying a home.

Now there's actually a third category with home warranties, and I know an investor who does this, they put a home warranty every year on every house that they own, and that way if there's something that happens, if the dishwasher breaks for them, the tenant simply pays $100 and they come out and fix it and they have no maintenance on any of their homes, it's an interesting concept.

Edna Wilson, your Hometown Realtor, as Hometown as Apple Pie.