Snowbird Pre-Departure Checklist: Locking Up Your Florida Home for the Summer

The call usually comes in late June. A neighbor noticed water seeping out under the garage door, or the lawn guy heard the AC running flat-out at 90 degrees because the thermostat lost Wi-Fi in May, or the HOA board emailed about a notice taped to the front door that has been there for three weeks. By the time the snowbird hears about it from 1,400 miles away, the damage is already a five-figure problem and the insurance adjuster is asking pointed questions about how often someone was checking the property. The Insurance Information Institute pegs the average water damage and freezing claim at roughly $15,400, and notes that water damage is the second most frequent homeowners claim category in the country, behind only wind and hail (Insurance Information Institute facts and statistics). For a Florida home that sits empty for five months in a humid, storm-prone climate, the real number is often higher.

If you have owned the place for a decade, you have your own version of this story — your own, or a friend down the street's. None of it is new. What is new is that the margin for error has narrowed. The Florida insurance market keeps tightening, vacancy clauses are being enforced more strictly, and the days when a vague "I'll check on it" from a friendly neighbor counted as a closing-up plan are over. This is the checklist you actually print, walk through with your spouse, and tape inside the laundry-room cabinet for next year.

Why a real snowbird checklist matters now

Three things changed in the last few years. First, carriers got far more aggressive about vacancy clauses — most standard HO-3 policies in Florida limit continuous unoccupancy to 30 or 60 days before coverage for vandalism, theft, and certain water losses can be denied. If you are gone five months without a documented home watch program in place, you are betting your deductible that nothing happens. Second, the squatter problem got real enough that the Legislature acted. Florida HB 621, signed March 27, 2024 and effective July 1, 2024, lets a property owner request the sheriff to immediately remove unauthorized occupants from a residential dwelling under specific conditions, and creates new criminal penalties for presenting fraudulent leases or deeds (Florida Senate, HB 621 (2024)). It is faster than the old civil ejectment process, but you still have to know the house is occupied — which means somebody has to be physically walking the property. Third, the named-storm deductible on most Florida policies is now 2 to 5 percent of the dwelling limit, separate from the all-other-perils deductible, and underwriters increasingly want to see a wind mitigation inspection on file (Form OIR-B1-1802) before they will write or renew. None of these are reasons to panic. They are reasons to stop winging the close-up.

This is the hub for our lock-and-leave checklist series. The deeper-dive companion pieces — summerizing a Florida vacation home, cellular monitoring for an empty snowbird home, smart water shut-offs for vacation homes, and home watch versus cameras — go further on each section below. Use this page as the spine.

Two to four weeks before departure

This window is the one most people compress into a frantic week, and it is where the expensive mistakes get made. Treat it like the engineering review.

Insurance review

• Read your vacancy clause. Pull the actual policy, not the declarations page. Find the language about unoccupancy and vacancy — usually 30 or 60 continuous days. If you trip the clause, certain perils stop being covered.
• Confirm a wind mitigation inspection (Form OIR-B1-1802) is on file and current. The form documents roof shape, roof deck attachment, roof-to-wall connection, opening protection, and secondary water resistance. Carriers translate those line items into hurricane premium discounts that often pay for the inspection many times over.
• Renew your Certificate of Alarm (CoA). Most Florida insurers want a current CoA from your monitored alarm provider on file before they apply the alarm credit. Some require it annually.
• Document a home watch arrangement in writing. Increasingly, underwriters want to see that an absentee homeowner has a documented inspection schedule — weekly is standard. Email yourself the agreement so you have a date stamp.
• Photograph everything. Walk every room, open every closet, narrate to your phone camera. Save it to the cloud. If you ever file a claim, the difference between "we think we had a TV in the den" and a 6-minute video tour is settled in days versus months.

Schedule your home watch

If you do not already have a relationship with a credentialed home watch service, this is the year to start. The National Association of Home Watch Professionals (NAHWP) accredits member businesses that follow defined inspection protocols and carry appropriate insurance. A weekly visit typically runs $40 to $75 in most Florida markets, with photo-documented reports through an app. The deeper comparison between human home watch and camera-only monitoring matters here — they solve different problems, and most snowbirds end up using both.

Shutters, landscaping, contractor calendar

• Shutters. If you have accordion or roll-down shutters, run them to confirm they close and lock. Replace key batteries on motorized units. Decide your storm policy now: closed all summer, closed by home watch on a named-storm watch, or closed only on a warning. Each has tradeoffs and your home watch contract should say which you chose.
• Landscaping. Schedule a heavy trim two weeks out — palm fronds, ficus, anything within 6 feet of the roofline. Loose vegetation is a missile in 70-mph winds.
• Contractor calendar. Pest control, pool service, lawn, AC tune-up, roof inspection if it has been more than a year. Get every visit on a shared calendar your home watch can see, so a strange truck in the driveway is either expected or a problem.

The week before

This week is mostly about the interior — getting the house into the configuration it will hold for five months without you.

• Fridge and freezer. Empty everything perishable. Many snowbirds unplug entirely, prop the doors with a rolled towel, and leave a box of baking soda inside. If you keep it running, set the freezer to medium and the fridge to its lowest setting that still cools — and put a single jar of water with a quarter sitting on top of the frozen surface inside the freezer. If you come home and the quarter is at the bottom of the jar, you know the freezer thawed and refroze while you were away. Throw out everything.
• HVAC. Set the thermostat to 78 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidistat to 55 to 60 percent relative humidity. The goal is not comfort, it is humidity control — Florida mold blooms above roughly 65 percent RH. A standalone humidistat that overrides the thermostat is worth its weight, and a smart thermostat with a leak/humidity sensor is even better.
• Water heater. Either flip it to "vacation" mode or shut it off at the breaker. There is no reason to keep 50 gallons of water at 120 degrees for a house no one is in.
• Unplug electronics. TVs, computers, microwaves, coffee maker, anything with a clock. Florida summer surges are routine and surge protectors degrade with each hit.
• Mail forwarding. USPS forwarding to your northern address, plus a hold on packages. Pause Amazon Subscribe and Save. Nothing tells the street the house is empty like a stack of yellowed flyers in the door jamb.
• Notify the HOA and one trusted neighbor. Give the HOA your contact info and your home watch contact. Give one neighbor a key, the alarm code (or a guest code), and the emergency call list. Tell no one else your dates. (If your property is in a condo or 55+ community, our guide to HOA-friendly security for Florida condos and 55+ communities covers what you can install without a board fight.)

The day of departure

Print this section. Do it in order. The goal is to leave the house in a known state, with a written record of what state that is.

• Water main shut-off. Close the main at the meter or at the house valve. If you have a smart water shut-off (Moen Flo, Phyn, or similar), you can leave the house plumbing pressurized and let the device cut water on a leak signature — covered in our smart water shut-off guide. Either approach beats the alternative. Most catastrophic empty-home losses are water, not fire and not theft.
• Breaker panel triage. Keep on: AC and humidistat circuit, alarm panel, refrigerator if you are leaving it running, garage door opener, any smart home hub or router. Kill: water heater, washer/dryer, dishwasher, oven, every general-purpose receptacle circuit you can identify. Photograph the panel before and after, with the date in frame.
• Surge protection. Confirm whole-home surge protection at the panel is functional and the indicator light is green. If you do not have one, add it before you leave — it is a one-hour electrician visit and it protects the alarm, HVAC controls, and any device you left plugged in.
• Trash. Empty every can, including bathrooms. Take it to the curb on the correct day, not the night before, or have your home watch handle the first pickup.
• Plants. Indoor plants go to a neighbor or the trash. Self-watering reservoirs are a leak risk over five months.
• Exterior. Lock every window. Pin every sliding door with a bar in the track. Confirm the garage door is down and disengage the opener so it cannot be cycled with a stolen remote or a code-grabber. Lock the side gate. Walk the perimeter once.
• Alarm arming sequence. Arm to "Away" or your platform's vacation mode. Confirm the keypad shows "ready" with no bypassed zones. Confirm the panel signal-tested with the central station within the last 30 days. Your CoA should already be on file with your insurer.
• Final photo set. Walk the house one more time with the phone camera. Every room. Every exterior elevation. The breaker panel. The water main. The thermostat. Email it to yourself with the subject line "Closeup [year]."

What to leave running, and why

The temptation is to kill power to everything. Resist it. A small set of always-on systems is the difference between catching a problem on day two and discovering it on month three.

• Security system on cellular backup. Wi-Fi-only panels go silent the first time the cable provider blips. Cellular backup with a current SIM is non-negotiable for a five-month absence — see cellular monitoring for empty snowbird homes for the full why. The CoA on file with your insurer is the paperwork half; the working radio is the operational half.
• Smart water shut-off. Either an automatic valve at the main or, at minimum, leak sensors at every fixture and the water heater pan, reporting to your phone.
• Smart thermostat with humidity and temperature alerts. Set thresholds at 85 degrees and 65 percent RH. If either trips, your home watch goes that day, not next Tuesday.
• One or two interior cameras covering the main living areas and the breaker panel hallway. Not as a replacement for human eyes, but as a verifier — when an alert fires, you want to see why before you spend $400 sending an emergency contractor.

These systems also feed the underwriting story. A documented monitored alarm, a working water shut-off, and a wind mitigation inspection on Form OIR-B1-1802 together can move the premium needle meaningfully — and on Florida hurricane premiums, "meaningfully" is real money. The full setup walkthrough lives in our summerize your Florida vacation home guide.

A note for Canadian snowbirds

The 182-day rule is a presence calculation, not a calendar date — the IRS substantial presence test counts all days in the current year, one-third of the prior year, and one-sixth of the year before that. Most Canadian snowbirds manage this by departing in late March and returning in mid-October, and by filing IRS Form 8840 (the Closer Connection Exception) when their counted days are close to the threshold (Canadian Snowbird Association on the 182-day rule). On the way out, also confirm your provincial health insurance coverage gap and your travel medical policy — provincial OHIP, RAMQ, and similar plans cover only a fraction of US medical costs, and the gap is exactly what CSA-style supplemental policies are designed to fill.

The first 48 hours after you arrive home in November

The reverse checklist is shorter, but skipping it is how a small problem becomes a renovation.

• Walk the perimeter before you unlock the door. Look for damaged screens, displaced shutters, anything off. Take photos.
• Disarm carefully and listen. A running toilet, a dripping line, an AC compressor cycling oddly — your ears are the first instrument.
• Open the water main slowly. Listen for a sustained hiss after the system pressurizes. If it does not stop, you have a leak somewhere. Close the main and call the plumber before you flip anything else on.
• Restore breakers in order. AC and HVAC first if not already on. Then refrigerator. Then water heater (after confirming the tank is full). Then general circuits.
• Run every faucet and flush every toilet for two minutes to clear stagnant water and refill traps that evaporated.
• Test the alarm with the central station. A signal test now beats discovering a dead radio in February.
• Read the home watch logs. Five months of weekly reports tell you what the house did while you were gone — and they are the paper trail your insurer wants if anything surfaces later.

None of this is glamorous. It is the practical work of owning a second home in a state that earns its insurance premiums. Done well, it is also the work that lets you actually unplug for the summer up north — knowing the house is being watched, the water cannot run for three months unnoticed, the alarm is talking to a central station over a working cell radio, and the paperwork your carrier wants is already on file. If you would like a clean walkthrough of the monitoring side of the stack — alarm with cellular backup, smart water shut-off, smart thermostat with leak and humidity alerts, and the wind mitigation paperwork that ties it all to a premium discount — we put a quote together at smartsecurityconcierge.com. No pressure, no contract before you have seen the line items.