[roasm]

This seems like a great area for disruption. You can imagine a property manager for a homeowner who you call for anything. They can charge a monthly fee plus a percentage on top of any (vetted) subs they use. A single person can probably juggle dozens to hundreds of homes; then scale that.

It's the services of a rental property manager without the rental part.

With adults these days (me included) being more technically savvy but less... handy, it seems perfect.

[AnimalMuppet]

Such things exist. I hear ads for them on the radio. They pitch themselves as "maintenance insurance" or some such, but I think it would do what you're asking.

[cglace]

You can get a home warranty that will cover a lot of the systems in your home.

[nowarranty]

As someone who has been through the pain of using a home warranty I highly recommend against it. When we had one we found one of 2 things always happened:

1. Whatever broke wasn't covered by the warranty. For example on a fridge, the most common component to break is the compressor, and that's not covered by a home warranty because it costs just slightly less than the cost of a refrigerator to repair. 2. The warranty company gets to choose who fixes your problem and they choose the lowest bidder, which is almost always a person who doesn't have better work to do because they aren't very good. Every single time I've used a home warranty, I had to have someone come back and re-do the work because it was so shoddy.

YMMV, but I've heard similar stories from others who have used them. I now consider a home warranty to be a negative rather than a positive because I've had to pay another person to come in and fix something correctly that was done improperly by a home warranty repair person.

[cglace]

All the time I used my warranty the work done was fine. You do have to pay a service fee for them to come out which is annoying.