Hey, there friends. This is Marilyn Boudreaux with Century 21 Bono Realty and I wanted to talk today about hurricane preparedness. Some of us have a kit that we keep all the time. It’s always good when hurricane season starts in June to freshen those kits up with things like your first aid supplies, your flashlights, your batteries, your water. Those are always good things to have on hand, but it’s not until the storm actually comes that we actually start to move into action and do things. So we have two storms that are actually named in the Gulf right now, Marco and Laura. And here in Southwest Louisiana, we all remember Hurricane Rita in 2005. So we lived through it, we know what it’s like, and we don’t want Laura to come back like a Rita.
What you need to do is move everything in off of your patio and your porch that could be a projectile. So for instance, we’ve got a lot of patio furniture. Now I’ve already taken the cushions off of them and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to stack our chairs and put them up in our garage later on. Also, these patio umbrellas that you have, anything like that, a hurricane wind, even if it’s a number one or number two, can really do damage to those and you don’t want that flying over the fence and hurting your neighbor.
One of the other things that I wanted to talk about is how storms affect real estate in general. So anytime there is a named storm in the Gulf, first of all, insurance binders cannot be written. So whenever you go to close, you have to have your homeowner’s insurance. Well, that binder sometimes is done the week before or as you get a little bit closer to closing, your insurance agent’s going to bind that new policy and it’s going to go into effect at closing. Well, none of that can actually be done right now. So if you are trying to close on a property, you’re probably going to get slowed up a little bit. You’re also going to get slowed down if there’s any kind of re-inspection that’s required. So if you’re down to the wire and you’ve had your appraisal done, and the appraiser has gone out and turned that in and then we do end up getting a hurricane that does damage here, most of the lenders are going to go require re-inspection of that property to make sure it’s in the same condition. Because we went through this, like I said, with Hurricane Rita and everyone thinks that it is going to be fine, but we had damaged roofs and trees down, holes in windows and all kinds of things.
So it can slow up things on the real estate, okay? It’s not just if you’re not purchasing and you’re just a homeowner and you’re trying to prepare for the storm, it’s whether you’re a seller or a buyer, you may get slowed up in this process. So lenders are just not going to be able to probably close and there’s going to be some extensions that have to be signed and executed if this storm does end up coming through and creating some damage here in Southwest Louisiana.
So keep that in mind and heed my tips. Turn your sprinklers off, if you have sprinklers, you don’t want to have those going on with all the rain that we’re expecting. Now, it’s beautiful out here today. Thank goodness, because everyone’s trying to get their yard mowed and get their water at the store, get their car filled up with gas. Just be mindful of picking up things around your own home, like flags, like I said, anything that could be a projectile that would cause damage during the storm. So stay safe, everyone.
