House-sitter available / hints & tips?
 

Hi,

We are a married 35 year old couple from Scotland & Germany. We have temporary residency visas (3 years) and will be arriving in the Coffs Harbour (NSW) area around January 2010. We're looking for a house to sit for a couple of weeks / months, while we job & house-hunt on arrival. Start and end dates are flexible. Happy to provide full job history, character references and any further info on request.

If you don't have a house which needs sitting but can offer any advice about house-sitting in Australia, please do. We're working thru websites atm but most require registration / annual membership fees from the prospective sitter, so if anyone knows of any free sitter listing sites please post!

Thanks!
Pam :)

Re: House-sitter available (Coffs Harbour area) / hints & tips?
 

Bump :)

Re: House-sitter available / hints & tips?
 

Hi there my parents use house sitters in Australia. They use a site mainly for security reasons, and of course it is free for the house owner. Any feed back about the sitter is always fed back to the agency and they do receive regular updates on who or who not to have as a house sitter.
Whilst it is not fool proof, it is an added security. CRB's are always necessary and they always ask for Australian passports/driving licences and checkable references.
To the best of my knowledge there are no free sites. I think due to the expanse of Australia, meeting up isnt always an option, but I know my parents try to keep a dialogue going for some considerable time after checking professional references. In general a house sitter (unless it is for a couple of weeks) is expected to pay for the electricity, provide a bond for services eg telephone, electric, gas etc, but rates are found by the owner.

best wishes

j

Re: House-sitter available / hints & tips?
 

hi there Pam, my parents use house sitters in Australia, and this is always done through an agency for security reasons. The agency do keep them informed of good/bad sitters etc. A CRB is necessary, professional references etc etc. They do check out all references thoroughly. My folks tend to ask for Australian passports/driving licences( maybe change over your licences)and a bond for telephone, electricity and gas etc. Rates are found by the home owner. All the above services are to be paid by the house sitter unless it is for a week or so.
If you are given PR then copies of your papers will be required as well. They use Mindmyhouse, and Housecarers I think, both good agencies and none of them are over the top expensive.

heres hoping for happy sits

j

Re: House-sitter available / hints & tips?
 

Register with housesitters.com.au

Re: House-sitter available / hints & tips?
 

Surely the low cost of registering with one of the websites is worth it considering how much you'd save on rent.

Re: House-sitter available / hints & tips?
 

Hi all, thanks very much for your responses, very useful & much appreciated! Karma on its way :)

Ref Comet555, yeah you certainly have a point there - thing is we do have other accomodation options, the house-sitting idea was just something to investigate on the off-chance & don't really want to fork out any cash for something we may not be able to use - altho in light of this new info in the posts below we may reconsider. Guess also that some people use house sitting as a regular flexible vacation tool and so an annual fee is well worth it but not so much so in our case, at least not right now.