FAQ
General Questions
Like other similar "compare" websites, our search bots pull in publicly available information and put it together in one place (in a similar manner to google and bing, but with more bells and whistles). This saves you having to visit every house sitting platform separately and applying your search filters each time.
The information on this site is updated regularly throughout the day, as our search bots regularly visit the platforms we support to keep our information as up to date as possible.
However, some platforms do not make their most recent listings publicly available, so you might have to sign up with those platforms to get their most up to date listings.
- See all the available house sit listings for all the platforms, in one place
- The ability to compare what each platform offers for the areas, dates etc. that you’re interested in
- More powerful search filters, helping you to find just the right house sit for you
- Find house sits on platforms you might have missed, on platforms you've not heard of
This website is merely a search engine showing you what house sits are available, with links through to the corresponding platforms offering the house sits (just like google, but better). If a listing is of interest to you, then use the link to visit the house sitting platform’s page and read more about the house sit on offer.
It is only through the actual platforms' websites that you can apply for house sits. You normally have to be a member of the platforms in order to be able to contact the home owner. Refer to each platform's terms and conditions for more information.
We don’t recommend any in particular, as every platform is unique in its own way.
Some have opportunities worldwide and others are country specific. Some are more expensive than others. Some have more opportunities but you will also have more competition as they have a larger number of sitters registered.
It would be impossible for us to know which ones are better suited to each particular individual, as there are so many factors to take into account. So, you are better off deciding for yourself which ones have more opportunities in the areas you are interested in (this site is very useful for that) and which one you find more user friendly. To begin with, we would recommend signing up to as many as you can afford, and then renew your membership with the ones that have proven more successful.
Because some home owners advertise in more than one platform, it is possible that you will get the same listing more than once in your search results, but on different platforms. This can be an advantage to you as a house sitter, as this increases the chance that they’ve advertised on a platform you’ve already signed up with.
For our search engine to be able to index the house sitting opportunities efficiently and automatically, there are certain minimum technical requirements that are needed. Additionally, in order to offer our users the best possible customer experience, we can only include platforms with a proven track record and a minimum number of active listings.
We did extensive research into all active house sitting platforms before deciding which ones met this simple, but important criteria – those who didn’t were not included.
We do our best to keep our results up to date with what appears on the house sitting platforms we support. However, we depend on the house sitting platforms themselves to delete or disable the listings that are no longer available. Similarly, platform owners also depend on their own users to use their site correctly – i.e. if home owners don’t close their listings when they have found a sitter for example, then there is no way for the platforms (and therefore us) to know this.
We do our best to retrieve the dates for all the house sit listings as accurately as possible, however this isn’t always possible, due to the “free text” format that some platforms use, e.g. “Around 20th December for about a week”.
Additionally, some home owners don’t specify any dates in their listings at all. This could be for a number of reasons: maybe they haven’t finalised their holiday plans yet; maybe it’s the first time the use house sitters and want to see what kind of response their listing receives before making further plans; maybe they want to find sitters they like “for future opportunities”. Whatever their reason, if your own plans offer a degree of flexibility, it will be worth running a search without specifying dates and explore these opportunities as well.
Search Filters
Ask ten different people to put the countries of the world into separate regions and you’ll get ten different answers. Our regions are loosely based on the United Nations geoscheme (see Wikipedia article)
We currently support the following regional groups Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Central America, Europe, Middle East, North America, Oceania and South America.
Select one of these options from the list of World Regions and the Country list below will be updated to reflect the countries in that region that currently have a house sit available.
A few countries allow you to also filter by State, to help you narrow down your search further, e.g. Australia, Canada and United States. However, not all listings mention the state in which the house sit is in, e.g. the location is simply “Springfield, United States”. Such listing will appear under the State filter of “Unknown”, and selecting an individual State such as “California” will not return these results.
Our filters allow you to search based on both the start and end date of a house sit. However, not all listings publish those dates. This could be because the owners haven’t made firm plans yet, or maybe because they are looking to make contact with sitters for various future opportunities.
Our listings display the duration of a house sit in the format:
Thu 25 Feb 2016 to Fri 25 Mar 2016
(30 days)
However, when a start date and/or end date are not available, the listing will simply show the duration as
(Unspecified days)
NOTE: If you enter start or end dates as one of your search filters, the “(Unspecified days)” listings will not appear in the search results.
Almost all house sits come with some form of responsibility, whether that be looking after pets, gardening, or maintaining a swimming pool. Our “Responsibility” filters will help you find the house sits you feel most comfortable with, so if you’re allergic to cats for example, then you can exclude house sits with cats from the results (most platforms don’t allow you to do this). Other people might love dogs and want to only look for listings that do have dogs. To help with this, we’ve got three options when it comes to filtering by responsibility...
- “Don’t Mind” – This is the default setting and means that the filter is not applied, i.e. selecting “Don’t Mind” for cats will return listings that mention cats AND listings that do not mention cats.
- “Must Have” – This means the listing must have the selected responsibility, i.e. selecting “Must Have” for cats will ONLY return listings that do mention cats.
- “No” – This means the listing must not have the selected responsibility, i.e. selecting “No” for cats will only return listings that make NO mention of cats.
Our search bots use powerful algorithms to try and determine what responsibilities each house sit requires. Some of the platforms have dedicated areas where home owners indicate what responsibilities the house sitter will have. When the platforms offer these options and the home owners fill them in correctly, our search engine will pick them up and show the corresponding icons in blue.
However, sometimes the options are not available, or the home owner fails to fill them in correctly, but they mention them in the description of the house sit. Sometimes the only clue we get is that the description mentions Chihuahua, Dalmatian or Greyhound. Our search engine is able to find these details and mark the listing as having a “Possible” responsibility for Dogs. In these cases the search results will show the listing with a dog icon that is grey instead of a blue.