House-sitting - your experience

in an attempt to save money, I was considering house sitting and hence did a google search. To my surprise, a website required payment in order for me to contact house owners. There does not seem to be reviews on house sitting websites.
So I was wondering… Is there any particular website that you would recommend? What is your experience/view on house-sitting?

Comments

  • +1

    We did Housesitting for a year while our house was being built. We used happy house sitters, they specialise in matching up house sitters for people with pets who need feeding/walking while they are away. Yes, there's a registration fee, but considering we saved thousands in renting, the fee was well worth it. We had about 8 houses in a year, one was a million dollar place with home theatre, pool and great city views! Lots of cute cats and dogs to mind as well.

    Can't speak for other Housesitting sites, but the one we used was pretty good (this was back in 2010). I think they might offer a free trial to see what's available in different housesit zones.

    However the average housesit is 2-3 weeks, unless you're lucky to find a long term sit, so plan to have a backup place to stay in the meantime.

    • thanks for this. will check them out :)

  • I used Happy House Sitters too. Did it on the basis of having a few mini-holidays which made paying the fee worth it. $300 or whatever it was for a few zones in Sydney (a few years back). Meant you could stay for a few weeks in different places versus 1-2 nights in a hotel. Remember - most of the places will be looking after their pets, cats or dogs, not just house sitting an empty house - so no good if you're alergic, or don't like animals.

    One final note, note sure if it is the same now, but when i did it, I did the free trail first and saw so many places listed and thought great - so many choices available. But when i paid to join and was able to contact the home owners, I was really pissed because even though they were still listed, the home owner had already found a sitter and just hadn't bothered to remove their ad. Some 2 or 4 weeks prior (i ended up asking them when i got several 'no sorry we've found a sitter')

    I even tried to get the website owners to modify the program so the home owners had to log in each week or something to keep their ad active, otherwise it would drop off, but i don't think they ever did anything. It was only later when new ads come up that you stood a chance of contacting them and maybe being asked to interview to be their sitter.

    You could try on Gumtree, but seems like there's more people wanting to be sitters than home owners looking for sitters.

    All the best.

    edit - looks like it's much cheaper now. $59 per year for one 'zone' or $149 for all NSW, $229 for all Australia. And looks like the home owner ads now have the date they were listed which will give you some indication. Also, they've got a few other search optoins now. Might have to consider doing this again!

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