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Home Ownersite Product Tour
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Welcome to the Home Ownersite Product Tour. You will soon find out that Home Ownersite is for far more than just home inventories, it is a complete personal property management tool for home owners or renters. To begin the tour, click on any of the thumbnails below to learn more about the application's functionality and to receive useful tips on how to get the most out of the product. You can also place your mouse over each thumbnail below to read more about that section. Enjoy the tour!
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The Product Tour helps you get the most out of your Home Ownersite experience and gives you some ideas how to best utilize the product in ways you may not have already considered. |
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Select Property
Technology is helping many of us organize in new and exciting ways. Managing multiple properties from an Internet device – personal computer, laptop, PDA, or Internet-enabled cell phone – is just one of Home Ownersite’s many unique and useful features. If you want to track all your property details – from a home inventory and maintenance schedule to mortgage, insurance, and property tax payments – can do so for each location – primary residence, vacation home, or rental property. All the essential information can be kept in one place through Home Ownersite’s online property management solution. Being able to stay up-to-date on all properties at once facilitates property management while saving valuable time and significant money.
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Main Menu
Navigating your way to new levels of property maintenance is easier than ever. Home Ownersite's main menu is the starting point for accessing any of the incredible functionality available within this property management solution. Each of the links launches the user into various information portals about the particular property, including details, rooms, inventory, tasks, photos, and more. The dashboard also has a section that displays specific tasks that might be due in terms of maintenance or payment as well as lists what categories currently have information as well as those that should be updated.
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Property Details
Step one is laying down all the structural basics from the ground up and the inside out. The Property Details section provides an at-a-glance list of the basic details about a particular property. These details include address, square footage, year built, price paid, lot size, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and the date purchased. All of this information is beneficial for tax purposes and for when the house is sold since most people will not remember some of this key information after a number of years have passed. Additionally, certain property details can also get mixed up if you own numerous properties and do not have separate records like Home Ownersite offers.
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Rooms
A home inventory does not take long to make and it sure pays off in the long run. Home Ownersite delivers an effective means for easily identifying and defining each room in your home or apartment to quickly add inventory items to the online home inventory list. Having the list defined by rooms will help an insurance person estimate the cost of the loss from a fire, natural disaster, or burglary. The rooms can be indentified by the floor where it is located, its name (e.g., living room), a photo, and a description. Along with this information, each room lists the number of items located there that have been detailed under the quick add section. It is simple to edit the details or include specific information.
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Inventory Listing
You never know when you might find it helpful to remember everything you own and how much it costs. The Home Ownersite Inventory Listing provides a brief overview of all the inventory items stored in that particular property account, including a thumbnail image and some specifics. The listing can be sorted by category, sub-category, description, location and whether or not it is included in the Home Ownersite reports page. Categories might include electronics, artwork, jewelry, furniture, antiques, or anything else that might be of interest to an insurance company or that you might want to carefully track. Additionally, the inventory can be filtered by a specific category. From the inventory listing, adding a new item only takes one click.
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Inventory Detail
It’s been said that the devil is in the details. The Home Ownersite Inventory Detail screen lets you "drill-down" to the specific details about each inventory items as well as enables you to quickly jump to other inventory items. Because the inventory is online, there is no concern about losing a paper copy or the computer that it is stored on. Instead, it can safely store the data that will be requested from insurance companies when a loss is reported. Information, such as purchase information, appraised and replacement values, serial numbers, photos, files (scanned receipts and PDF versions of owner's manuals), and notes on the item, can all be shared, saving time and hassle when an unfortunate event actually happens. All of this information can easily be compiled into a report by Home Ownersite and emailed to an insurance company, facilitating a payout on damaged or lost items.
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Categories
Now is the time to put a label on everything you own. Home Ownersite provides a pre-built list of common categories, such as art, appliances, electronics, and clothing in which inventory items can be easily assigned. The property management site also provides an easy way to create custom categories and subcategories. For example, Home Ownersite has a category called collectibles, but perhaps you want to get more granular in your description, so you can set up a subcategory for “baseball cards” or even go a step further by defining it as “Topps baseball cards.”
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Tasks
No one likes cleaning, maintenance, and repairs but staying on schedule with these tasks saves money and hassle as well as increases safety, reliability, and value. As an online “honey do” list, Home Ownersite’s Tasks section reminds the homeowner or renter of often overlooked, but very important, maintenance work that can increase the property’s value, safety, and reliability. Listed on the site are suggested maintenance tasks that should be done on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis that have been directly recommended by home experts. The page also provides the functionality to add custom tasks for each property listed under the “define new task” link. The reminder option can also be added or edited to keep a home owner on task.
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Journal
No one can argue with documentation. Home Ownersite’s Journal is an online mechanism that helps conveniently maintain all documentation on the work – both maintenance and repair – that has been done on each property they own. Much easier to work with than a physical journal, this virtual record can keep track of other items, including warranty claims and home improvement and remodeling projects. The journal allows you to enter the date of the work, the subject (i.e., painting or air conditioning repair), the type of work, the room, whether any inventory items were involved, and the cost. Each journal entry can also have a supporting attachment like a receipt or before and after photos.
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Insurance
Most people seem to have their insurance documents stuffed in a kitchen drawer or buried in a pile of paper in a home office. Offering a convenient way to stay organized and prepared, Home Ownersite provides an online information depository so that you can access critical coverage information when you need it the most – during or just after a disaster, fire, or burglary – or simply when it comes time to renew. The Insurance section has a place to store digital copies of policies, detailed coverage, deductible amounts, and agent contact information.
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Tax Documents
There are only two things in life that are certain: death and taxes. The dreaded state and federal taxes hit once a year, but you also may have to remember property taxes each December and April. Home Ownersite gives you an easy way to maintain and store a tax history on local, county, city, state or federal charges for each property. After a few years of recorded taxes, Home Ownersite will also help you track assessed values and tax amounts to better educate yourself about your home or multiple properties as an important aspect of your investment portfolio.
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Mortgage Documents
Until recently, most homeowners did not give much thought to their mortgages. However, as mortgages have become more complex, such as the use of adjustable interest rates where the payment fluctuates, it has become truly valuable to have an online location to access mortgage details to stay on top of the changes. Home Ownersite helps you stay current on payments with a property management solution that can be logged into from a personal computer to a Blackberry. All the details on each mortgage can be stored here, including the type of mortgage, the terms (length of the mortgage and the interest rate), the payment recipient, the principal balance, payment amount, and the due date.
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File Storage
Paper files can be cumbersome and unorganized as well as vulnerable to damage or theft. Digital files, however, provide a more efficient and safe way to store valuable and somewhat irreplaceable information. Although you can attach files to each section of the Home Ownersite portal, the File Storage section serves as a central location for all files as well as those that may not be related to inventory items, insurance, taxes, or mortgages. The file storage section accepts file formats, such as DOC, XLS, PDF, or TXT, and it can also be used to save property videos or anything else that helps maintain a property.
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Photo Storage
Have you performed major renovations or do you want a place to store before and after photos that show a home project? How about saving that Google Earth aerial photo? Or, perhaps you want a safe place where you or your insurance agent can securely access stored pictures of damage to your property after a flood, fire, break-in or natural disaster. Home Ownersite offers convenient photo storage for anything that pertains to your home and provides room for a description and notes to be added for each uploaded photo. The site automatically resizes the GIF, JPG, or PNG files to a web-friendly size for easy viewing and photo sharing.
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Reports
Make it official by putting together a report that delivers the comprehensive information that you can use to rebound from a disaster or as a tool to illustrate the value of your property to a prospective buyer. Home Ownersite makes it easy to share the details of your home inventory in the event of a disaster or other life-changing event. The public webpage can be customized with password protection, filtered by categories, and limited in terms of the details shared, enabling a homeowner to only share the information with an insurance agent or an appraiser that pertains to the situation.
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Homeowner Resources
As a homeowner, the best thing you can do is educate yourself about your property, how it works, how it can be fixed or improved, and what repairs cost as well as what is involved in the mortgage, buying and selling, remodeling, property tax, and insurance processes. Thanks to the Internet, there are now hundreds of thousands of useful resources for homeowners and renters available at the click of a mouse. The experts behind Home Ownersite are constantly searching out the best information available and compiling them for use in the Resources section. There are a range of topics and many customized links that are related to the state or states that you have listed on your property details page. This is also a good place to store your own favorite home-related resources so that you remember them for future visits.
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Report Details
The beauty of technology is that it lets you share some information while keeping other data private without having to constantly redo an entire report. Home Ownersite provides Report Details functionality where you can create a customized, password-protected webpage that holds information about your inventory items. This webpage can then be shared with your insurance company, facilitating the agent’s work they must do to get your claim paid. Having the ability to do this is very helpful if your computer was destroyed in a disaster or it was stolen because you may still have your PDA or web-enabled cell phone so that you can quickly send a report and be on the road to recovery. It is also possible to export a list of your inventory items to Excel or to create a text file.
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Public Page
When you want to go public with the intimate aspects of your property, you are ready to go. Home Ownersite offers a public page that makes select information on your properties available and accessible to those you control. The Public Page makes it quick and easy to send a link to your insurance agent to document loss claims or provide them with a list of valuables that you need to have insured. The page can be password protected and filtered by category to show any and all details that are listed within your inventory, including personal effects, receipts, photos, and more.
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