If you are a new house sitter, or someone with one or two house sits under your belt, you could be wondering how easy it will be to keep finding house sits. This is a bigger concern if you intend to use house sitting as part of a full time nomadic lifestyle. 

We are often asked how we manage to consistently secure back-to-back house sitting jobs in the locations of our choice. Well, firstly let me tell you, we have had to put some work in to make this happen.

Home sitting jobs rarely just drop into our inbox, conveniently timed in just the right location, to make our life easy! We've worked hard to perfect our profile and our house sit applications. This helps us get more house sitting jobs, more of the time!

Here we share our tips to help you get the same results.

1.  Join more than one house sit site

This is the easiest way to get maximum exposure and to get your house sit profile seen by as many home and pet owners as possible.

But isn't this an expensive option?

As full-time house sitters, we don't worry about the cost of joining international house sitting websites or country based platforms. Most subscriptions are the equivalent of a night or two in a hotel or Airbnb.  We figure the overall saving on our annual accommodation easily compensates this expense.

As full time global nomads who have sold their properties, it's difficult to get ongoing police clearance checks, but this internet transparency has worked in our favour. If you don't want people to see your online presence, make sure that you change your settings accordingly. 

5.  Join a house sitting referral group

As you get more house sits under your belt, you'll find that you'll begin connecting, and even meeting up with other house sitters on your travels. Through networking in this way you'll discover that there are a few select referral groups on the house sit circuit.  If you can get referrals in this way, you'll find some unique sits that often don't ever get advertised on house sitting sites.

Seven years into this lifestyle adventure, our house sits are selected from house sit platforms, repeat sits, our own website/social media, and from referrals. That's a good base from which to secure plentiful ongoing sits!

7.  Know what you want when reviewing assignments

Obviously the location and dates are important, so we isolate those sits that fit the time period gaps on our calendar. We don't overlook those that overlap a little - if they are close by we could separate to cover a day or two on overlapping sits. Sometimes home owners are able to be flexible with their dates, especially if they have't booked their flights.

We've overlapped several times now, with the home owner consent. In this way we were able to cover a period that might otherwise have been more difficult - again, maximize your possibilities by thinking outside the box.

Next we assess the home owner's advert:

8.  Know what to avoid about house sits

This is a list that will potentially grow as you become more established as a house sitter. It's only after experiencing a number of different situations, in a variety of environments, that we've really identified what to avoid for our particular situation. Here are just a few of these items:

9.  Apply quickly and personalize applications

As soon as you've found an assignment that suits you, send in your application. I think the key to success is to personalize your email or message and make connections. Talk about points from within the advert and use the pet's names. If you identify with something in the listing, or perhaps know the area, then mention this. We often become friends with our home owners and this is usually because we find sits where we make like-minded connections.

When making an application, remember at all times that it is about fulfilling the home owner's needs first, not your own. Talk about how you can do that. Draw on your experiences and put links to anything that can back up your application, such as your personal website, a blog you've written - anything to reaffirm your credibility.

I'm not suggesting that you negate your own needs, but don't make them the focus of your application.

We refer a homeowner to all of our references in one place on our website, but if you don't have this, create a word document or a PDF that you can attach to your application. It helps to make this visual too - include pictures alongside your written references.

Offer to video chat at a time that suits them.

Be sympathetic to the fact that the homeowners are likely to be overwhelmed with enquiries, especially if they are in popular locations.

10.  Maximize exposure of references in applications

We are often asked, "What if I'm new to a site and my references are on other platforms?"  This is a more common situation than you may think, especially if you want to increase your house sitting job opportunities by subscribing to more than one house sitting platform.

But don't worry, it's easily dealt with.

When we first joined TrustedHousesitters, we had to compete with house sitters that had 20+ references. Of course we took advantage of the facility to request reviews from people we'd previously sat for, but we also took some pro-active actions:

11.  Keep on top of your house sit applications

When we don't hear back within 3-5 days, we send a reminder message or email.

If we don't hear back within a few days of this, we pretty much write off that application and move on. If a reply does happen to come through later, don't feel bad if you've already found something else. You made the effort to connect and it wasn't reciprocated.

This is an opportunity to remind home owners that they need to respond quickly these days to get the best house sitters - we often ask that they keep our details on record for future house sitting opportunities.

We've often found that slow responses equal patchy communication on an ongoing basis, which is worrying for us when we are filling a year round schedule. So, we do prefer to deal with people who take the time to respond promptly, even if it's a cut and paste, "We've been overwhelmed with responses but we'll get back to you soon".