What Website to Use
The Two Main Players..
Here’s a quick rundown of the pros and cons of the two house sitting websites that we use. We won’t list websites that we haven’t used as we don’t think it’s fair to compare based on the publicly available functions and risk passing on wrong information which could affect your choice.
You’ll find with both there’s an equal mix of everyday homes of various sizes and age, more luxurious options and friendly people to deal with. The vast majority in NZ are in Auckland but it’s definitely growing quickly enough that you can easily travel the country and tie together continuous jobs. About 75% of house sits will be in the North Island and 25% in the South.
The initial “rules” are the same for both websites really; learn the basics, create a profile with some nice pictures, find what suits you and arrange a video interview to make sure you’re comfortable with each other initially and go through a few questions. It’s hard to live in a stranger's home or have a complete stranger come into yours so there’s no room for shyness here!
Kiwi House Sitters - Our #1 Choice
A place to connect
Pros for House Sitters
- Customised search functions which you can easily turn into email alerts for new listings. Being able to search by location, dates, house sit length or animal type is absolutely ideal but don’t bother with any of the other filters as they’re optional fields for the homeowners. You risk narrowing your search too far when people don’t have to post the other information.
- As it’s free for homeowners to list, this is easily the most popular website used here. This leads to enough variety of animals and house sit lengths that you can be a bit pickier with your searches. Don’t like dogs? Just do cats or farm animals then. Only want to do one location which isn’t Auckland? Bit more freedom for that too.
- Built in message system for ease of communication. Everyone’s rated on how quickly they respond to messages and you can see when messages have been read. Feel like you’re being blanked? Move on to the next one! Does someone have a 1 star reply rating? Put them in the maybe basket if you’re in a rush, otherwise be prepared to wait a week or so for a reply. It’s far easier to just chat away to owners here and keep it as a permanent record.
- Ease of sending attachments such as references and police checks. Upload to your profile once and you can pick and choose from the list what to send to potential clients.
- Availability calendar. You can add confirmed house sits or any other dates to your profile so homeowners know whether it’s worth contacting you instead of posting an ad.
- As mentioned above, you can be contacted out of the blue. Some homeowners prefer to be in control from the get go and may choose one or several house sitters from the list of profiles to contact. Our favourite ever house sit came out of nowhere thanks to this feature and it’s now a repeat house sit for absolutely awesome clients.
- Great for finding a house for 4+ weeks which is now our preferred option.
- Loyalty system means lower annual fees the longer you’re registered.
- Homeowners are emailed regularly to write a review after your sit’s finished and you can place reviews for homeowners. It’s great to have that two way relationship rather than some websites which just have a rating for the house sitter. You can have bad homeowners too, afterall, but we've met many incredibly friendly and lovely people through this company.
- International affiliations. If you travel to other countries like Australia, Canada, America or the UK then you can link your profiles and share the reviews. Invaluable when it’s such a trust based relationship.
Pros for Homeowners
- It’s free for you to browse housesitters first before paying to post an ad. There’s a huge variety of personality types to suit most people if you’re after someone specific. You can have people who live life on the road full time like us, new residents who miss their animals back home, tourists who are very flexible on location and just want free accommodation, or you can have anyone who’s just tired of spending all their hard earned money on rent and just want to sit in a specific location so they can try to save a deposit for a house. We’ve even seen professional farm managers who’ve retired early and just love to just travel the country to look after different farms.
- Be in control. You don’t have to list your home information publicly. Instead, sign up as a homeowner and pick who you think matches your personality, pet requirements and have your holiday dates free in their calendar so you can message them privately. Pick house sitters who have a 5 star reply rating and remember to keep yourself safe and check for reviews, ID verification and police checks. If you don’t have time to find people then you can still post it up but please use pictures! We constantly have to ask for pictures to make sure we were comfortable with a home when we’ve found great dates and locations. If you’re uncomfortable with pictures being public then post it without pictures but specify at the top of your post that you’re a private person and will decide who to provide pictures to based on the applications.
Cons for House Sitters
- Can seem like a bit of a free for all. All house sitter pictures, profiles and home owner listings are completely public, no need to login or anything to view. People still need to be registered to contact you.
- Newly registered accounts will have a 5 star reply rating which doesn’t really warn you that it could take them a week or more to respond if they’re one of the rare disorganised people. We understand everyone has different priorities or house sitting might be new to people but for us we love to be organised and value quick communication.
- No indemnity insurance provided by the company. As a house sitter, you should agree to cover any accidental breakages but always make sure the homeowner has valid home & contents insurance while you’re there in case of anything random like a fire or burglary.
Cons for Homeowners
- House sitters aren’t personally verified. Most just have an ID verified badge which means one of their IDs is verified by an automated system. Do your due diligence and keep yourself safe by always checking for reviews, references and police checks on their profiles. Police checks in NZ are free to obtain and there’s no reason these can’t be provided after an interview. It’s a pretty extreme ruse a burglar has to go through to get access to your home but you always need to be safe when you open up your home and hand over care for any pets.
- We’re not aware of any punishment for someone who doesn’t turn up for a house sit so you do have to take everyone for their word. This is where a history of reviews provides an insight to the character of those you’re trusting.
- No indemnity insurance is provided which could lead to disputes regarding accidental damage. It’s critical to make sure your insurance company will cover your home and contents while a house sitter is looking after your property.
The Housesitting Company
All sitters screened before being allowed access
Pros for House Sitters
- If you want to get more confidence as you’re new to this then you’ll get the chance to have a really honest conversation with one of their employees during the online interview process, plus guidance on the interview, photos and profile creation process.
- Indemnity insurance is provided. Accidently break something of high value? Ring or email the company instantly. If it’s of low value then replacing it is the polite thing to do.
- Love dogs? This website is at least 95% dog and house sitting.
Pros for Homeowners
- All house sitters are verified by the company before they’re allowed on the website. This includes reference and police checks. Due to this, you should be getting house sitters that you know have at least a little bit of experience.
- House sitters are banned if they cancel on you without an extremely good reason. This is a big selling point for the company by using sitters that are extremely reliable.
- Your listing and photos are hidden behind registered users which gives you a little more privacy so you can feel comfortable to include pictures of your home.
- Be in control. You don’t have to list your home ad. Instead, sign up as a homeowner and pick who you think matches your dates, personality and pet requirements from the list of profiles. The downside to this is you don’t know who’s available as when we get contacted by this company we're specifically told to ignore you unless we're free to help. In our opinion, that's a horrible way of getting you answers quickly. A recent addition of availability calendars hasn't helped as house sitters can't actually see these in our profiles so they're completely pointless.
- Indemnity insurance is provided in case of major damage which gives you a little peace of mind. It’s still critical to contact your insurance company to ensure you’re still covered while house sitters are there. If you didn’t and something did happen, you go against the website T&Cs and run the risk of voiding the indemnity insurance while your insurer may have a tiny detail in your contract about having to contact them prior to guests looking after your home. Best to avoid that scenario!
Cons for House Sitters
- Search, filter and email notifications functions are useless. We’ve seen many misspelt locations in house ads so searching by location reduces your results due to homeowner error. If you set up an email alert you’ll get every single house ad, often repeatedly, because so many go unfulfilled.
- Not a dog person? Good luck keeping up with the house ads. At least 95% of the ads are looking after dogs so you need to be a dog person to use this site exclusively.
- It’s the homeowners who feel more valued because that’s where this company gets their profit. The initial interview process was great and run by a very friendly staff member but the other side has been on the rare instances we’ve asked for some advice it's been a “I don’t know, sort it out yourself” from the other staff member.
- Because homeowners pay for a service, our feeling is good communication from them isn’t pushed by the company. In our opinion, this is a bad way of doing things as homeowners will run the risk of missing out on house sitters who apply for several at the same time and honour a first come first serve basis.
- Linked in with the above two points, some homeowners have very easily got the impression that we’re an employee who gets paid for what we do and they were surprised to hear we don't. As a result, sometimes the effort they put into their homes felt less because they’ve paid for the service. We’ve had to deep clean two properties on arrival to make it liveable and also arrived at properties with either sick pets, no room left for our belongings and no functioning hob/oven without warning.
- Without at least 2 house sitting references then you will get denied entry to the website but only after paying the fee. Try sitting for friends/family first to get these.
- You’ll be left to chase reviews and if you do get any they’re generally very short in our experience. Better than nothing for your house sitting portfolio but not great if you put in a lot of effort and go above and beyond. It’s a real 50/50 split. When the half who don’t post reviews send praise privately by email and/or phone it makes it appear there’s no automatic review system or reminder function on the website.
- Homeowners have no reviews and communication is hidden behind the website. All your applications go directly to the homeowner for review and it’s a mystery whether you’ll hear anything or when they’ve read your application. You either get notified if/when the house sit is fulfilled or you’ll get a phone call from a homeowner asking for a chat to organise an interview. We even had one phone us asking where we were the day before their holiday when we hadn't had a response from our application 3 weeks prior. We’ve easily withdrawn at least 10 applications because homeowners didn’t respond and some of those ads have still been up months later.
Cons for Homeowners
- The cost can vary greatly depending on how many animals you have and holiday length.
- You’re paying for reliability but there’s no guarantee a sitter will be found. Keep this in mind and make sure you post with plenty of notice before your holiday in case you need to post elsewhere.
- If you aren’t fast then you’re likely to miss out. Don’t just leave it a week for applications to come in. If you see an application you like, get an interview lined up right away.
- We’ve been told by at least 3 homeowners (who now use kiwi house sitters) that the website’s very clunky and repetitive to use. We haven’t gone through the homeowner side of the process before and can’t confirm directly but it’s a bit of a theme now.
- You can’t see availability calendars of the sitter profiles which makes it time consuming trying to find someone for your required dates.
At the end of the day, it’s a personal choice and depends on what your priorities are. The big selling point for The Housesitting Company is the reliability of sitters, however we know that a lot of ads go unfulfilled. The big selling point of Kiwi House Sitters is the size of the membership base and that’s really due to the fact it used to be free for owners to list which helps maintain a large database of active users so everyone's more likely to find what they need.
