Most owners arrive here with a maintenance checklist that was written for another climate. It is a good list — service the heating once a year, clear the gutters in the fall, look at the roof in spring — and on a Mexican coast almost none of its dates survive contact with the place. Salt does not wait for a season, humidity works hardest in the months you are not in the house, and the storm calendar decides when heavy work is even possible.
This page is the coastal home maintenance checklist as we actually run it, and the annual plan it turns into. It is one part of full-service management for luxury homes, and it runs whether or not the house earns anything.
Salt air damage to a home is not one problem, it is three. It corrodes metal, it shortens the service life of anything with a fan or a coil, and it works continuously — there is no off-season for it, which is why a schedule built around two seasonal visits a year leaves nine months uncovered. On the coast the exterior air-conditioning unit and the fixings holding it are the first things to go, and they go quietly.
Humidity damage in a vacation home is slower and more expensive, because it is the house's own air doing it. In Cancún the relative humidity sits around 80% and September is the wettest month of the year. A closed bathroom in that air does not need a leak to grow mold; it needs three weeks. Preventing mold in a beach house is therefore a matter of running the air conditioning as a dehumidifier on short cycles rather than of cleaning more often.
And a closed house is a biological event as much as a mechanical one. Standing water in a bucket, a plant saucer or a blocked drain becomes an Aedes aegypti breeding site within days, which is exactly what an unattended patio produces after a week of afternoon rain, and Quintana Roo remains among the states with the highest dengue incidence in the country.
Preventive maintenance for a vacation home is not a longer list than yours. It is the same list on a different clock, and the clock is the part that has to be right.
| What is working on the house | What it reaches first | How we answer it |
|---|---|---|
| Salt air | The exterior air-conditioning unit, fixings, hinges, railings, outdoor hardware | The coil rinsed with fresh water at every visit, hardware specified in stainless steel, exteriors washed and repainted with an anti-mold product on a two-to-three-year cycle. |
| Humidity | Bathrooms, closets, soft furnishings, anything with a circuit board | Air conditioning run as a dehumidifier rather than for comfort, filters changed monthly on the coast instead of seasonally, closets left ajar, textiles never stored damp. |
| Standing water | Patios, plant saucers, roof drains, the pool waterline | Cleared at every visit; pool chemistry, filters and waterline on a weekly task, because hard water shows there before it shows anywhere else. |
| Power, and what it carries | The pump, the rooftop tank, the freezer, anything that restarts badly | Tanks filled and equipment lowered ahead of a known outage. When the peninsula lost power all at once in September 2025, houses drawing water through an electric pump lost the water a few hours later. |
| The storm season | The whole house at once | Heavy work closed before the season opens — 1 June on the Atlantic side, 15 May on the Pacific — with the closing sequence agreed in writing beforehand. |
Every visit leaves photographs and a written note of what was found, including the visits where nothing was found. A report on an empty house is only worth something if it can be checked.
A preventive home maintenance schedule that works in Los Cabos is the wrong schedule in Cancún, and not by a few weeks. The Pacific season opens two weeks before the Atlantic one, so the window for heavy work closes earlier on that side; and in Los Cabos water is the second constraint, because San José del Cabo has been running on the emergency tanker programme published by OOMSAPAS, which means work that consumes water is scheduled with the utility rather than against it.
What reaches the house is the other local variable, and it changes less by region than by street. Along Tulum's beach road the properties have neither sanitary drainage nor a grid connection, and run on their own generating plants as a normal condition of operation. A plan written for a house there carries a whole column that a house in the town centre does not have, and it treats the generating plant the way an inland plan treats the roof: as the thing everything else is resting on.
Inland is a different animal again: no storm season, a rainy season instead, and heritage permits that have to be counted as calendar time rather than as paperwork. That is why the plan is dated per house and revised once a year, rather than sold as a package with a fixed month attached to each task.
A vacant house is not a house on pause; it is more work than an occupied one, not less. A house with people in it reports on itself for free — a window gets opened, a blocked drain gets stood in, a room that smells wrong gets its door left ajar. Closed, there is no reporter: the air stays where it is, the drain stays blocked until whoever comes next, and every five-minute correction that was never made arrives together, in the week you land. Home maintenance while you are away is the work of putting that reporting back.
Maintenance for second-home owners changes again if the house is let. It wears faster, it has to be returned to its own standard between stays, and the preventive calendar tightens rather than disappears; that side of the operation is described on vacation rental management. Air-conditioning maintenance in a vacation rental is the clearest case: the same unit that keeps mold out of a closed house is also the one a guest will judge you on within an hour of arriving.
There is no preventive maintenance cost on this page, and a figure quoted before anyone has seen the house is a figure about a different house. Two things move it more than the rest. The first is the distance from the sea: a house on the front line runs its air conditioning, its hardware and its exterior paint on a shorter cycle than an identical house ten blocks inland, and the difference is measured in years of equipment life rather than in preference. The second is how long the house stands closed, because the months with nobody in them are the ones that generate work instead of saving it.
How the money is presented does not vary. Our fee is a percentage of income, net of expenses, and coordinating the calendar sits inside it; the cost of the work itself — vendor, part, material — is an expense of the house, paid with its receipt and shown as its own line in the monthly statement, where the total is calculated from the lines rather than the other way round.
If you are still deciding which service this house needs, the services overview sets them side by side, and the areas we serve explains what changes between one coast and another.
Air conditioning, pool, roofs and drains, tank and pump, exterior metalwork, garden and standing water, each on its own frequency and its own date. The tasks are ordinary; what is not ordinary is that the coast decides which months they can be done in.
Three weeks in closed air is all a bathroom needs, so whatever answers it has to keep working while the house is empty rather than wait for the next visit. The air conditioning is set to hold the air dry in short cycles instead of to cool, interior doors stay open so that no room keeps its own weather, and nothing that holds water is left standing anywhere. Cleaning takes away what has already grown; only drier air decides whether there is a next one.
In this office the filter is changed monthly rather than seasonally, the outdoor coil is rinsed with fresh water at every visit, and the unit has an annual service. A house on the front line of the sea needs that rhythm from the first year.
No: this is the preventive calendar, which is one part of a wider service. Custody of the house, the vendors, the utilities and the paperwork are set out on full-service management for luxury homes.
Yes, and that is the case the service was built for. The calendar does not depend on the house earning anything; if the house is let, the calendar tightens rather than changes.
The season is treated as a deadline rather than as an event. Heavy work — roofs, exteriors, anything that needs scaffolding or a delivery — is placed in the months before it opens, and the house is left with a written closing sequence: what gets filled, what comes down off the roof, and who does it. Nothing on that list is settled in the week a storm is given a name.
Tell us where the house is, how it is built, how long it stands closed and what has failed before. We will answer in writing with the plan the house needs for the year and the months each part of it can be done in.