If you’re taking a vacation this year, and especially if it’s a long one, you may be thinking of hiring a house sitter. Maybe you don’t want your pets at the kennel for weeks on end, or you don’t want to come back to an empty house and find that it really is, well, empty. According to the FBI, in 2013, the most recent statistics available, there were an estimated 1,928,465 burglaries in the U.S. That’s a decrease of 8.6 percent from the year before, but still, that’s small comfort for those 1.9 million Americans.
Yet even if you hire a house sitter, that doesn’t automatically mean your home is protected. In April, for instance, a house and pet sitter in Louisville, Kentucky, was arrested for allegedly stealing over $14,800 worth of property from a house. To avoid becoming a cautionary tale, you’ll want to be thoughtful in your approach before handing over your keys.
How to find a sitter. You can go with someone you know, say a pal or a family member, but if you’re still coming up short, or feel you need to upgrade your friends before you entrust any of them to watch your home, you could hire a professional house sitter. Many services offer to match you with a house sitter, such as MindMyHouse.com, TrustedHousesitters.com, HouseSittersAmerica.com, LuxuryHouseSitting.com and even TheBabysittingCompany.com.
How much you’ll pay. It depends on whom you find and what you’re asking that person to do. Sometimes, you could pay nothing, especially if you’ll be gone a long time, since you’re giving someone a place to live. For instance, with TrustedHousesitters.com, the sitters will watch your home for free, feeling that’s a perfectly good trade for free lodging. (But you will pay the website for access to a house sitter: $49.99 buys you a month’s access; $95.88 gets you a year.)
If you’re leaving someone with daily responsibilities, you may need to get out your wallet.
“My rates are $50 a night, for up to two small pets. I only work with dogs and cats — no reptiles for me,” says Kimbirly Orr, a Denver resident who owns a digital media agency and house sits up to four times a month.
“I can do my work pretty much anywhere and love house sitting. It’s a peaceful way to get away while earning a secondary income,” she says.
What a house sitter will do. Pretty much anything — within reason. Getting the mail. Watering the plants. If you’re going to be away for a while, and you have a lawn mower, you can probably expect the house sitter to cut the grass.
Susan Caba, a 60-year-old writer and editor based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is not only gearing up to house sit in Santa Barbara, California, but she says she’s even paid homeowners’ bills in their absence and once was asked to transfer $20,000 from a bank in California to a bank in Costa Rica. Like many house sitters, she does what she does for free, in exchange for a pleasant place to live; she has been house sitting for about a year now, ever since she sold her home in St. Louis, after her son graduated from college.
“Basically, I’m doing it to help decide where I’d like to settle next,” Caba says. “I’ve had assignments around the corner from John Glenn’s house in a D.C. suburb, a repeat annual stint in Santa Barbara, California, and an eight-month housesit in North Carolina.”
Expect something to go wrong. Chances are, nothing will. After all, that’s why you have a house sitter — to be there so things don’t go wrong. But a house can have problems through the fault of no one, and that’s where a house sitter can be invaluable. Barbara Elaine Singer, a life reinvention coach who lived in Orlando, Florida, until she began house sitting regularly around the world — she is currently in Bali — says she once was watching a home in Italy when a pipe burst in the middle of the night and water shot out of the wall and into the lower apartment.
“I was running down the street, banging on neighbors’ doors, shouting like a crazy woman in my broken Italian, until I found someone to help me,” she says.
Caba also discovered a broken water pipe in the basement of the home she was watching in North Carolina. She found it while looking for one of the homeowners’ three cats.
“The owner had said that they had a cat that would disappear from the home for a couple days at a time,” Caba says. So after not seeing the cat for some time, she went searching the property, only to find a leak in the basement. That led to her having to call a plumber and email the homeowner photos, so he could see the damage and stay in the loop on the water problems.
“He told me, ‘I feel terrible you had to deal with this,’ but as I told him, this is why you have a house sitter,” Caba says.
What she was less prepared for was the grisly discovery of the missing cat on the same day as the leaking pipe. It had apparently been hit by a car on a country road. Later in the year, Caba discovered that the home’s pipes were freezing over, and she was able to warm them up to prevent damage.
Of course, if something does go wrong, you don’t want it to be due to the house sitter you hire, which is why should ask for references, Singer says. Even if you’re planning on using someone who has never house sat before, you can still get character references. And while it should be obvious, Singer says you’ll want someone “mature, responsible, normal — without addictions.”
But a safe bet is generally going to be someone who house sits frequently. “As a former Girl Scout, I believe in leaving my campground better than I found it. This belief transfers to staying in another’s home, definitely,” Orr says, adding that she does everything from light housekeeping to weeding gardens when she stays in a home. “My clients are appreciative of the work I provide, and I’ve been asked back monthly and annually for several clients.”
That’s the thing: House sitters who do this a lot want to keep doing this. It’s easy to be wary of handing your keys to a stranger, then leaving. But for many house sitters, this is a profession or a lifestyle (maybe both), and they have every incentive to do a good job. If you someday need someone to watch your home, they hope you’ll give them a call and will put out the welcome mat.
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Your Guide to Hiring a House Sitter originally appeared on usnews.com