Housesitter.com: Is it Worth the Fees?

What is Housesitter.com?

Housesitter.com allows homeowners, house and pet sitters to sign up and seek both house sitters and employment as a house sitter.

(This post may contain affiliate links. You can read our full affiliate policy here.)

How it works

Like other housesitting sites, homeowners and sitters are encouraged to register and create a profile on Housesitter.com. However, while the site does offer a free plan, that plan makes it impossible for house sitters and potential clients to talk to one another.

Homeowners must pay $16 a month or $116 a year to join and communicate with potential sitters here. Housesitters pay $26.40 a month or $90 a year to communicate with homeowners. (How they came up with the membership fees is a mystery.)

Membership fees are also renewed automatically and are non-refundable.

Sitters everywhere

In testing the site, we saw tons of profiles that didn’t ring true. Specifically, dozens of house sitters happened to live in the tiny town where we happened to be working from when testing the site. This doesn’t happen with much larger, much more successful sites. Our guess is that the site uses your geolocation data and AI to make things up.

And then…within minutes of bailing out of offering a test housesitting job, we received 8 emails from potential house sitters.

Our takeaway: The site either has an abundance of sitters or creates fake sitter emails to get you to pay their fees. We think it’s the later. And our view is shared by a number of people who have reviewed this site after paying their fees.

Not surprisingly, reviews of this site also are nearly universally bad.

Recommendations:

If you are looking to make money as a house or pet-sitter, we’d recommend you sign up for Rover, which gets millions of page views each month and actively operates around the country.

(You can sign up with Rover here.)

If you are looking to exchange house and pet sitting for free accommodations, check out TrustedHousesitters. It’s the largest housesitting site and offers some unique features that make its fees well worth the cost. You can read our TrustedHousesitter review here.

Or sign up for TrustedHousesitters here.)

What their users say (from Indeed.com)

Let me be clear, I’ve house sat and watched pets for years and it is a wonderful job. Five stars all around. HOWEVER, DO NOT USE HOUSESITTER.COM. You’ll pay a fee to join and there are almost NO people looking for house sitting. All of the existing profiles are outdated, last touched in 2018. The only response I received was from a person I believed to be a predator who wanted my address, along with my banking information. Horrible customer service. NO listings that are relevant. Steer clear.

From SiteJabber

This is NOT legitimate business. They take your credit card information and charge you randomly on auto renew, or fees. My experience resulted in a series of charges on a card that I thought was inactive due to late fees. Really horrible situation. If you try to contest it, they will not remove the charges, but try to convince you that you “signed up” for a renewal. The WORST company! DO NOT give them your card info or any information on your home!

Most unfortunately this is an international ring. It is clear it is a scam because 1) Regardless of the city I chose, the same names came up looking for a house sitter. 2) Diaz is an example in both San Fran and in Phoenix. He needs snow removal in PHX… really? It never gets cold enough to snow there, so their attention to detail is poor. 3) The English tenses of every single person looking for a house sitter demonstrate English is not their first language. SHAME ON YOU and go build a real business – there is clearly a niche/need. Why not actually fill it?

Stay away

I never found work thru this site. I believe it’s not a properly setup company.

Paid the $90 fee for an annual subscription and have responded to MULTIPLE people looking for a house sitter and have only received one response which was from a man named Steve that after applying, came back and said he’s looking to hire people to do book reviews. There are no real people on this site, and I am a professional house sitter and know this is bogus. They will not refund your subscription, and now you can see why. Stay away and save your money. This site should be shut down.

I joined for a couple of months. In other words I gave them money for nothing. Scammers in myy text messages and postings OLD. Keep your money just say no.