If you're leaving a Melbourne home empty for more than a few weeks, the essentials are: turn the water off at the mains, stop or redirect the mail, keep the garden maintained, tell your insurer, and arrange for someone to check inside weekly. Everything below explains why each one matters — and the order reflects what actually goes wrong, not what people worry about most.
Reviewed July 2026 · written for homeowners in Carnegie, Caulfield, Malvern, Glen Iris, Elsternwick, Oakleigh, Bentleigh and surroundsWater is the number one cause of damage in empty homes, and the usual culprit is the least impressive part in your house: the flexible braided hose connecting your taps and toilets to the wall. IAG analysis of Australian household water damage claims found flexible hose failures behind roughly one in five of them, and Suncorp's 2026 data puts the average burst flexi-hose claim at $30,000, with 6% of claims exceeding $100,000. One Queensland family returned from holiday to more than $500,000 in damage from a single failed hose.
A burst hose releases water at mains pressure — over 20 litres a minute. In an occupied house it's discovered in hours. In an empty one, it runs until someone comes.
Two details worth knowing: hoses last roughly 10 years and most homeowners have never had theirs inspected, and the hot-side hose fails most often, because temperature cycling weakens it faster. The check is running your hand along the braid feeling for bulges, kinks or rust, especially at tight bends.
Before you go: turn the water off at the mains or meter, photograph the meter in its off position, and check every flexi hose — hot side first. If anything looks corroded, a plumber can replace a hose for far less than an excess.
An overflowing letterbox and an unmown lawn are the two loudest "nobody's home" signals a street can broadcast. Melbourne travellers go to remarkable lengths on this one — randomised light timers, radios left on talk stations, a friend's car parked in the carport, work boots by the front door, curtains set half-closed.
Props help, but the signals that matter are the ones that change: bins that go out and come back on collection day, mail that disappears, a lawn that stays cut, lights that don't run on an obviously fixed schedule. A static display reads as a display. Genuine weekly activity doesn't.
One more signal people forget: your own social media. Posting holiday photos in real time announces the empty house to a wider audience than the street ever sees. Save the album for when you're back.
Before you go: put lights on randomised timers, arrange bins and lawn, and agree who posts what online — after you're home.
Australia Post can hold mail for up to a few months, or redirect it to family interstate. Both work. What doesn't work is nothing: a letterbox stuffed with catalogues is visible from the road and tells everyone exactly how long you've been gone.
If someone is checking the house weekly, collection beats a hold — the letterbox keeps behaving like a lived-in letterbox, and parcels or hand-delivered notices (which no hold service catches) don't sit on the porch.
Before you go: book a hold or redirection, or add mail clearing to your weekly check. Add a "no junk mail" sticker either way.
The lawn is the one task travellers already naturally pay for — a mow once or twice during a long trip is a small spend that removes the most visible sign of absence. Melbourne summers can brown a garden in a fortnight; winters mostly look after the watering but not the growth.
For gardens that matter to you, a tap-timer watering system covers beds and pots, and indoor plants can go to a friend or get watered on a schedule. Mow the lawn the day before you fly so the clock starts from zero.
Before you go: book a mid-trip mow (your regular gardener, or coordinated through whoever checks the house), set tap timers, and consolidate indoor plants into one easy-to-water spot.
Many Australian home policies quietly change once a home has been unoccupied for around 60 consecutive days. Depending on the insurer, that can mean an added excess, extra conditions, or an exclusion unless the home is kept in a lived-in state — some policies specifically list weekly inside-and-outside checks, stopped mail and garden upkeep as the conditions.
The safe sequence is simple: read your own PDS, call your insurer before you fly, and keep records of what you agreed and what care the house received while you were away. Only you can make that call — no service can do it for you, and nobody should promise their visits alone "keep you covered."
We've read the unoccupancy wording of the major insurers, with page references, so you can find your own clause quickly: what each insurer's documents actually say.
Before you go: find the unoccupancy section of your PDS, call your insurer, and note down the date, who you spoke to and what was agreed.
A closed-up house through a Melbourne winter grows condensation on the inside of the windows — warm moist air with nowhere to go. Left for two months, that's a mould problem, and mould from gradual causes is exactly the kind of damage insurers exclude. Moisture-absorber tubs help; what actually fixes it is the thing no camera or timer can do — opening the house up and letting it breathe.
Before you go: place moisture absorbers in closed rooms, and have whoever checks the house air it out on each visit.
Ask ten travellers and you'll get ten configurations: unplug everything except the fridge; empty the fridge and prop it open; switch the hot water service off; leave it on so a fault doesn't hide for weeks. There's genuinely no consensus, and most configurations are defensible.
Two rules do hold. Never put a fridge on a timer or smart plug — a randomised timer cutting fridge power mid-trip produces a homecoming smell you will not forget. And whatever you choose, write it down, so anyone entering the house knows what "normal" looks like and can spot when something's changed.
Before you go: decide your configuration, record it, unplug what you're not using, and turn off the iron.
Run the taps. Water traps under sinks, showers and floor drains dry out in an unused house, letting sewer gas in. A brief run of each tap on a regular schedule refills them and moves stagnant water out of the pipes.
Pests. Cockroach gel and ant sand before you leave are cheap. Garages deserve a look during any long absence — parked cars are known nesting spots, and chewed wiring is an expensive discovery.
Cars. Lock them, consider disconnecting the battery for very long trips, and think about position: an empty carport visible from the street is itself a signal. Some owners deliberately leave a car in view.
Keys. Whoever holds yours, make sure you know exactly who has access, and that there's a plan if that person gets sick, travels themselves, or simply forgets. The most common failure of the informal arrangement isn't bad faith — it's that a favour has no backup.
Before you go: agree the tap-run and garage check with whoever's visiting, lay pest deterrents, position the car deliberately, and confirm your key plan has a fallback.
Away & Okay does every item on this page as a weekly visit — mail cleared, taps run, house aired, garden coordinated, condition photographed — with a timestamped report to your phone each week and a dated log of every visit. Serving Carnegie, Caulfield, Malvern, Glen Iris, Elsternwick, Oakleigh, Bentleigh and surrounds.