After the December 9 tornadoes: the call list every owner should already have
On December 9 a tornado outbreak moved across Middle Tennessee. An EF2 hit Madison and killed three people, Hendersonville was struck, an EF3 tore through Clarksville, and more than 100,000 customers lost power.
I am not going to dress that up into a business lesson. People lost family members ten miles from homes we manage.
What I will do is write the practical thing, because I spent the following week on the phone and the difference between the owners who were fine and the owners who were not came down to preparation that took an afternoon.
What the week after actually looks like
Power goes out. Guests are mid-stay in a home with no heat in December. Some want to leave, some want to stay, all of them want an answer in the next ten minutes.
Then the trees. A limb on a roof is a next-day problem in June and a same-day problem when it is 34 degrees and raining. Every tree service and every roofer in the county is booked by 9am. If you are calling around after the storm, you are number 200 in a queue.
Then the platform side. Cancellations, refund decisions, extenuating-circumstances claims, guests arriving to a home that is not habitable. Every one of those is a decision somebody has to make quickly, with money attached.
None of that is hard. All of it is impossible to do well starting from zero at 6am.
The list, before you need it
Three names per trade, with cell numbers, in your phone. Roofer, tree service, general handyman, plumber, electrician, HVAC. Not a Google search — actual humans who have been to your house before and will pick up. The relationship is the asset.
A power-out decision already made. Decide now, in writing, what you do when a home loses power with guests in it. Ours is simple: under four hours we communicate and wait, over four hours in freezing weather we relocate at our cost and sort the money out afterward. Deciding that in advance turns a crisis into a script.
Water shutoff location, photographed. In the listing operations file, not in your memory. A frozen pipe becomes a $30,000 problem in the ninety minutes it takes someone to find the valve.
Insurance documents where you can reach them from a phone. Policy number, agent's cell, the endorsement page. If you have never asked your agent specifically how your policy treats a short-term rental use, ask before you need to know.
A guest message you have already written. Two paragraphs, calm, specific, with what you are doing and when you will update them next. Write it now while you are not stressed.
How we run it
Every home we manage has a maintenance file with the vendor list, the shutoff locations, the utility account numbers and the access details, and our team can reach it from a phone at 3am. It stays current because somebody walks each home on a quarterly checklist, testing locks and batteries and detectors before any of them fail on a bad night. Maintenance requests get dispatched within hours in normal weeks and immediately in weeks like this one. Guest messaging is covered around the clock, so a guest sitting in a cold house is talking to a person, not a voicemail box — that coverage is part of how management works here, not an add-on you buy after a storm.
Owners hear from me directly on anything that involves a decision or a dollar. That is not a service tier, it is just how I run it — you have my number.
And every dollar of that work passes through at the vendor's actual cost. We do not mark up maintenance, and it shows on the statement as its own line for the same reason pass-throughs like tax and cleaning get their own lines rather than being folded into a net deposit. In a week like December 9 that matters more than usual, because emergency pricing is already painful without someone taking a percentage of it.
Also worth noting this week
The Fed held rates on December 13, and the 30-year fixed came back under 7 percent for the first time since August, printing 6.95 percent that week. That is a genuine step down from the climb I wrote about in October, when the new mayor took office and the 30-year was heading the other way. If you have been waiting to refinance or to underwrite a second property, the door has moved slightly. Not open — moved.
I mention it because the two stories are related in a way owners underrate. Your ability to absorb a bad week is a balance-sheet question. Cheaper debt and a real reserve are what let you make the right call for a guest in a storm instead of the cheap one.
Going into the holidays
New Year's is the biggest week of the Nashville calendar and the weather is unpredictable. Check your detectors, check your heat, know where your shutoff is, and have three numbers in your phone.
Take care of your neighbors in Madison and Clarksville if you can.
If you would rather have someone else holding that list and answering the 3am message, that is what we do. Get started here and I will walk you through how we cover a home.