What Website to Use

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’s free for owners to list which helps maintain a large database of active users so everyone's more likely to find what they need.

For sitters, you really can't look past Kiwi Housesitters for ease of use and the friendliness of the homeowners you'll encounter. If you have the cash, don't care if you only get short sits and love dogs then just sign up for The Housesitting Company after you're set up on Kiwi House Sitters. You can easily copy over your profile from Kiwi House Sitters, get 2 references and do the interview. If you’re in a pinch with a gap in your calendar then that $59 a year is still bloody cheap rent. Despite the fact we probably won't be using The Housesitting Company from 2023 onwards, we've still been to incredible locations, met lovely people and looked after some truly awesome animals that we'll never forget.