Author Topic: Housesitting  (Read 3154 times)

galumay

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Housesitting
« on: February 15, 2015, 07:26:43 AM »
On our gap year we have tried to take advantage of house sitting in NZ to offset accommodation costs, there are several sites you can sign up to and I will give a quick review of them, one thing we have found is that its very competitive, its not easy to get sits and you need to be flexible with dates and places, transport is a definite need, and you have to think about how much looking after pets might cramp your plans for activities.

http://www.trustedhousesitters.com/

One of the biggest, has house sits all round the world - but its super competitive, there are so many sitters on the site, we never got a response from a single sit in 3 months of applying. Does have some amazing international opportunities. Plans range from a casual month for $58, or an annual membership for $132 - which sounds a lot until you remember even 1 night house sitting will save that much in accommodation charges!

https://www.housesitters.co.nz/

Like most sites they require police checks and references. They have quite a good system whereby only the first 3 applicants to house sit are sent on to the owner, and they choose the one they want. We ound that by keeping a close eye on email we could consistently apply quick enough to be among the first 3 - but we only got 1 house sit from dozens of applications and that was one that we were the only applicants for because of location and situation. Its free to join for outside Auckland, but $49 if you want to be able to apply for Auckland sits. We paid and it was worth it for us - only 1 sit but 5 nights which saved a lot more than $50!


https://www.kiwihousesitters.co.nz/

This site is the one we had most success with, picking up 3 house sits, the big advantage for us with this site is that they allow owners to post up contact details like mobile numbers, this meant we would see a sit we liked when it was posted and then I would message our interest online on the site and if there was a number posted, ring the owners straight away. I am convinced this made a big difference to our success rate, i suspect a lot of sitters dont try ringing until they have heard back from the site. It costs $65 for a year. They also required a police check and references.

http://www.homesit.co.nz

This company seemed at first to be the best, and we did get one sit from them, but the owner pulled out after discovering we had a child. (which is a bit sus because it would have been very hard to miss in our profile and the photos of Kai!!). They required not just references and police checks but also a skype interview with the site owners before you can apply for sits. As it turned out they had a very small listing of potential sits, by far the smallest of all the sites. It was about $50 per year.

If I was only looking in NZ, then the pick of the sites was the https://www.kiwihousesitters.co.nz/

Miyalk

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Re: Housesitting
« Reply #1 on: February 17, 2015, 04:11:21 PM »
Great review! Any way you could post onto other forum (link to view) so it goes global?