An empty house is not a house at rest. It is a house with all of its systems stopped, and stopped systems fail in ways that running ones do not.
Traps dry out and the drains vent into the rooms. Standing water in a stilled circuit goes anaerobic. Seals that are never flexed go hard and then go brittle. Timber that is never warmed takes on damp at the ends. None of this is dramatic and all of it is cumulative.
We surveyed a property in 2023 that had been shut for eleven months with the utilities on and nobody attending. The repair came to a little over four times what a year of weekly attendance would have cost — and that excludes the two original fittings that could not be saved and had to be matched instead.
Vacancy is not the absence of cost. It is a cost that has been deferred, with interest, and paid in fabric rather than money.