Housesitting: What is it and is it for everyone?

What is housesitting?

So, first things first, what is housesitting? Housesitting is an exchange – people come and look after the homes and pets for people who are away from home. The people who come to look after peoples’ homes and pets are called housesitters. The people who host them are called homeowners or ‘Pet Parents’ which is a term coined by Trusted Housesitters – one of the websites you can use to try it out.

It’s something which has been around for decades but has really taken off in the last ten years or so due to the apps and websites which now facilitate it.

It can be paid work for housesitters but the majority of housesitting is unpaid and based on reviews. This makes it a complete trust exchange.

Is it for everyone?

When anyone asks me this question my answer is always a big yes! That’s a yes in capital letters. Housesitting can absolutely work for everyone and anyone.

You can use it for holidays – whether you want a short city break, a hiking adventure or a few weeks’ on the beach. I recommend this to everyone I know as it’s so easy to do and will change the way you look at holidaying. It can also save you loads of money as you can get free accommodation for all your trips.

Yes – you heard that right! Housesitting is a massive movement which, if you use review based websites like Trusted Housesitters to do it, only costs £100-£200 a year to sign up and use for unlimited housesits. So this means you can go and stay in an apartment in central New York City to look after a cat for free. This won’t impact your holiday very much as cats are low maintenance and fairly self-sufficient. Alternatively you could go to Australia and look after a mansion with a pool just to feed a lizard or a pond of fish, both of which barely require care. Obviously you have to look after and be respectful of the home you are staying in.

You can also use housesitting for long term travel which is what we do. We started housesitting early last year close to where we lived in the UK. We spent any free weekends we had exploring our own country and places quite close to our own home. We loved the freedom it gave us, and when we had to have our cat Selma put down in April, we loved the way we could connect with animals by looking after other peoples’ pets.

We both had jobs we loved, but Tom got a fully remote job in July last year and I realised it was a sign from the universe that perhaps we could travel full time, if we could both work remotely. This was a difficult decision for me, as I loved my job in the police and had recently joined the Major Crime Team where I’d wanted to work for some time.

I spent a lot of time in the summer of 2022 trying to decide what to do. In the end, it came down to one day when I remembered a passage from a book I’d read – The Chimp Paradox. In the book, Steve Peters describes our “life force”; our main driver in life, and the way he explains this is to imagine theoretically that you’re on our death bed, and a younger person comes to ask you what they should do with their life. Your answer to this question shows you what your life force is. I asked myself this question, and my answer was still the same as it had been when I first read the book years before. My answer was “travel”. I quit my job the next week.

We rented our house out as it was going to be empty and have been travelling full time going from housesit to housesit and looking after pets all over the world for a year now.

When I say that housesitting is for everyone I really do mean it.

In my book I go through loads of different scenarios to showcase the fact that it is true.

Whether you are a solo traveller, couple, group of friends, family, or are travelling with a pet, housesitting could be the key that unlocks the door to freedom for you! Your tribe is obviously important to you, so make sure you read this section of my book to find out my top tips for your housesitting set up!

Housesitting can also work well for people travelling with disabilities and health conditions, whether they are physical or mental. The best thing to do is to prioritise your health and talk to homeowners at length about what you need to be able to housesit successfully and thrive whilst doing it. This may be considering the house layout, accessibility and nearby health centres.

If you are a green traveller, housesitting can work for you as long as you are mindful about the travel between sits, considering how you will get there with a low impact on the environment. It’s also quite hard to keep up the green lifestyle whilst in someone else’s home, or when in a new area, and I’ve written a chapter specifically on this topic in my book.

If you are housesitting in the UK, the first things to do when you get to a housesit to keep yourself aligned with your green-travel self are as follows:

-          Find out how to recycle / deal with food waste in that area – bin colours, collection days and points are different all over the country

-          Reach out to the community to find out if there are any green initiatives in the area which you could get involved with

-          Find the nearest charity shop so that if you have anything you want to shred before you move onto the next housesit you can easily donate it, and if you find yourself needing something whilst there you know where to go to get it

I hope this blog post has explained a little more about what housesitting actually is and has encouraged you to give it a go!