Don’t Pay for Travel Accommodations. Become a House Sitter.

By becoming a house sitter, you can avoid paying the costs for accommodations on your adventure travels.

Housesitting is a job that provides you a free place to stay while the homeowner is away for an extended period, ranging from a coupe weeks to many months or perhaps years.

The price you pay is a little labor and vigilance, watering plants, general maintenance, feeding pets, and ensuring that nothing catches on fire.

House sitting won’t pay your adventure travel bills, but it is an effective way to reduce adventure travel costs, thus slowing your adventure travel burn.

If you pair housesitting with a remote job, such as online freelance work, selling crafts, blogging, or teaching lessons, then you have the ability to make your travel nut take you further.

While you will reduce costs by not paying for accommodations, you can also bring in a little money. Your can stretch your dollars further because you don’t have the burden of paying for lodging, such as campsites, hostels, and hotels.

How to Get Started with Housesitting

The first step towards becoming a successful house sitter is to start with people that you know.

Reach out to your family and friends to see if anyone is going out of town anytime soon.

Once you land a house sitting job from one of these connections, you now have your first reference, which you can use to secure more jobs in the future.

References are super critical in the housesitting world, as homeowners place a lot of trust in a house sitter, giving that person access to personal property and entrusting them with property care taking.

Using the Internet to Get Housesitting Jobs

There are three major websites which are used by people all over the world to connect travelers and house sitters.

Each of the sites requires an annual fee, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared with how much you’ll save compared with spending even a single night in a hotel.

• Mindmyhouse.com only requires a $20 annual fee and has quite a few house sits available in both Europe and North America.
• Housecarers.com is not as functional as MindMyHouse, but it features a lot of sits in Australia and New Zealand. It’ll cost you $55 a year to use the service.
• Trustedhousesitters.com is arguably the best site on the web for finding house sits. It’s also the most expensive, costing you an annual fee of $60. Still, there are a ton of listings in Europe, with Australia and North American offerings starting to appear.

In order to land these house sits, you’re going to need a great profile (with pictures and plenty of details), good references, and a fantastic opening email.

You’re essentially a freelancer at this point, so you want to sell your service and convince your “clients” that you’ll take exceptional care of their house.

Making Your House Sitting a Success by Providing Excellent Customer Service

When you’re staying in someone else’s house, you want to make sure that you treat it even better than you would treat your own house.

Follow the homeowner’s instructions to the letter, clean up all your messes, and generally try to make sure the house looks better than it did when your hosts left on their trip.

Provide periodic updates to the homeowner, a quick email to let them know everything is well will likely suffice to keep them apprised of the situation.

If you totally botch a house sit and get rated poorly on one of the aforementioned websites, you’re probably going to have a tough time winning the trust of other homeowners.

Providing great customer services will ensure that you get a great reference, which will help you get more house sitting gigs in the future.