Service Line Warranties of Canada recently welcomed new partnerships with Port Colborne, Erin, Aylmer and Region of Durham in Ontario, offering our educational materials and optional warranties to nearly another quarter million Ontarians, and Bashaw in Alberta, the first of many partnerships in the Energy Province.
Our agreement with the Region of Peel, which is one of our longest continuous and most successful partnerships in the country, recently was renewed for another five years, and another one of our oldest partners, EPCOR, recently expanded the partnership.
New partners are interested, and current partnerships maintained because they are built on a foundation of trust and transparency. Our educational materials help homeowners understand their responsibility to maintain the service lines that connect their homes’ water, sewer and electric service to the city or utility’s mains, and we work closely with our partners on messaging. Materials are not mailed to homeowners until they are approved by our partners, and our account management team is dedicated to keeping the lines of communication open and offering robust program support to our partners.
“Our Canadian-based team has a willingness to test and learn new approaches to bring our educational message to homeowners, such as digital marketing through display ads and social media,” Mike VanHorne, general manager, said.
These educational and warranty options meet a demand from homeowners from their communities and utilities. In the State of the Canadian Home survey, two-thirds of homeowners didn’t know they were financially responsible for repairs or replacements to their service lines, with 18% of homeowners believing the repairs would be covered by homeowners’ insurance and 20% believing their municipality or utility would be responsible.
These repairs are not ordinarily covered by homeowners’ insurance, although some companies are offering coverage as riders. However, these riders still require homeowners pay out-of-pocket and be reimbursed by the insurance company and may include a deductible. Service Lines Warranties offers no deductibles and pays contractors directly.
A homeowners’ insurance rider may have exceptions such as freezing lines and homeowners making a claim risk rising premium rates. Additionally, when making an insurance claim, homeowners are forced to seek out and find their own contractors. With one-third of homeowners reporting difficulty finding a contractor for home repairs, this just adds to the inconvenience of having a service line failure.
Given these misconceptions, it’s not surprising that nearly 90 percent of homeowners said that their municipality or utility should help educate them on their service line responsibilities – exactly what the educational portion of our program does.
“Homeowners are under significant financial pressure with 40-year high inflation,” VanHorne said. “At times like these, it’s difficult for any homeowner to manage an unexpected and potentially costly emergency repair. That’s especially true for new homeowners, who over the last two years, likely purchased a home at record prices.”
Our optional warranties offer peace of mind to homeowners by providing a 24/7, North American-based repair hotline. With one call, homeowners can have a local, licensed and insured contractor dispatched to their home to repair their service line. Service Line Warranties pays the contractor directly up to the benefit amount. There are no service call fees, deductibles or out-of-pocket tests.
The program also has a high customer satisfaction rate of 4.7 stars out of five and is committed to partnering with local contractors to ensure quality repair work is done quickly and is consistent with local codes.
Service Line Warranties has also partnered with several municipal organizations and Local Authority Services, a corporation of Association of Municipalities of Ontario. This underscores our commitment to transparency and education, since we put our program under scrutiny by not only municipalities and utilities, but by our partner agencies.
For more information on partnerships, contact us.