A Message to Property Managers on Valentine’s Day

A reflection on what it means to love your house – and how to share that love with the people you rent it to.

On the occasion of Valentine’s Day, which seems to grow in commercial intensity every year – we’d like to reflect on an aspect of love that is central to what we do at Belong.

After all, our mission is to connect much-loved houses with people who will love them back. And there is absolutely no doubt that people do love their houses. Google can confirm that; there are over 7 billion hits for the simple yet evocative phrase “I love my house.”

Perfection is not the point, though, it’s not the predicate for love, not the reason you smile inside every time you arrive back home. As Paul McCartney sang in the song “I Love This House”:

“Holes in the gutters, holes in the slate, holes in the carpet but I won't evacuate.

I love this house, it's where I’ll stay, eat and sleep the night and day.

I love this house, it's where I’ll be, for you to spend some time with me…”

Putting aside slate/evacuate – not one of McCartney’s most elegant rhymes – it’s a relatable message, especially if you are a homeowner with more than one house. Because when the time came and you didn’t need to live in one of those houses – maybe you no longer needed someplace that big, or you moved out-of-the-town – you didn’t treat it like a clinical asset and sell it. It embodied too much meaning for you to do something like that, so you decided to keep it and hopefully find someone to live in it who would feel the same way. Someone who could build a parallel stream of memories.

You own a home.

We have someone to ❤️  it.

Before we started Belong, we took a close look at the way property managers treated houses. And we didn’t like what we saw.  There was an absence of love and caring – in fact there was even basic respect. So we decided to create something different; not to be too saccharine, but at Belong, we go about our work with a sense of responsibility to Home Love. We want to be a company built on the mission of sending every day Valentines. 

We do that thanks to the platform we have built, which combines what technology can do best – organize, communicate, track, and streamline – with what people can do best. If the secret of a successful relationship between two people is “responsiveness” and “anticipation” – then we believe the same applies to how we connect with the houses we love.

The Belong platform will respond to needs literally in the moment. Our Concierges are there 24/7, whenever a need arises, no matter how big, or how small. After all, as we all know, sometimes the smallest gestures and the simplest reminders that you’re there for someone can have the biggest impact.

But thinking ahead – the Art of Anticipation – is also an essential signifier of love. It’s tricky in People World, but not that complicated in House World. We know when the furnace filters need to be changed, when to check the weatherstripping, when to have the leaders and gutters cleaned – and all those moments can be programmed into an intuitive digital platform.

That’s one way technology can automate love, but come to think of it, when 1800Flowers reminds you of Valentine’s Day a week in advance – or an upcoming anniversary – isn’t that the same thing?

In a world that is growing scarier and more unpredictable by the day, the emotional power and state-of-love that a home represents has never meant more. In 2019, the National Book Award went to a book that was a memoir about…a house. Called “The Yellow House: A Memoir,” the book – by Sarah M. Broom – uses the titular house as the centerpiece for a narrative about family, New Orleans, and community. Broom’s description of how she felt when the house was destroyed by Katrina is a powerful description of what a house can mean:

“When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”

If you feel that way about the house you own, if want someone to live in it who understands that –  and want someone to manage it who doesn’t look at your home like a collection of walls and windows, but as a structure with a living past, present and future – we invite you to reach out to us. On Valentine’s Day, or any day.