Select Home Warranty Review

Friday, August 12th

2022 Home Warranty Company Reviews

Select Home Warranty

• In business for 10+ years
• 3 warranty plans to choose from
• Discounts when you pay annually instead of monthly
• Undisclosed trade service call fees

Based in New Jersey and in business since 2012, Select Home Warranty offers coverage for appliances, home systems, or a combination of the two.

Choose from 3 plans

Select Home Warranty has three plans:

• Bronze Care: covers the clothes washer and dryer, refrigerator, built-in microwave, cooktop, stove/oven, and garbage disposal - basically just your appliances.
• Gold Care: covers your HVAC, water heater, ductwork, electrical and plumbing.
• Platinum Care: includes all features in the Gold and Bronze plans, and adds protection for your garage door opener, ceiling fans, and plumbing stoppage.

When you select one of SHW's plans, you'll see a la carte coverage at the bottom. For example, you could include coverage of your lawn sprinkler system for $5.83/month, your sump pump for $3.33/month, and so on.

Look for promotions

At the time of this review, Select Home Warranty was offering a promo that included $150 off any plan, free roof coverage, and two extra months free on plans paid yearly. So, in our area, our options were Bronze or Gold Care for $44.42/month, or Platinum Care for $47.75/month. Annually, these plans were priced at $479.99 and $524.99, respectively.

Service fees not shown

We don't love that Select Home Warranty doesn't make it clear that customers will be charged a trade service call fee for every claim - or maybe even more than one fee, if different trades are required to make a repair (electrical and plumbing for a short in the kitchen sink area). We got through the entire sign-up process without having that disclosed. Throughout the site, it references a "small fee" , and even their terms and conditions just say "a $ fee" without giving a number. Not very transparent, is it? Finally, digging through years-old blog posts, we found a reference to a fee that "ranges from $75 to $100, depending on the length of your contract" - but again, that wasn't shown anywhere during the quote and payment process.

Expect repair delays

The Better Business Bureau gives Select Home Warranty a "B" rating. That stems from over 4800 complaints filed with the BBB in the three years leading up to this evaluation - which is, sadly, not unusual among home warranty companies. The "B" rating indicates that despite having a large number of complaints, SHW is doing a satisfactory job of responding to and resolving them. The biggest source of problems here seems to be repairs scheduling: it can take weeks before a broken AC unit, pipe, or appliance gets serviced and fixed by a technician. Of course, this may vary based on where you live, and on the availability of parts and repair specialists.

Five-star reviews... so far

In contrast, we found lots of love for Select Home Warranty plans too: over 1600 five-star reviews from people who describe getting prompt service on claims and affordable pricing. We did note that some of those five-star reviews were strictly based on the sign-up experience (friendly sales rep, affordable plans) - and we wonder if those glowing reviews might drop in the future after they've had to make a claim.

On the right track but still lacking

We give Select Home Warranty props for cleaning things up since our last review: they've actually done more to show their coverage and pricing now than in the past, and we didn't find the broken links and spelling errors from our previous evaluation. But, that's not quite enough to earn a boost in our rating. SHW needs to be much more transparent with their call fees, and we'd like to see more attention to on-time repairs as well. Try a better-ranked home warranty company first.