AROUND-OZ MOTORHOMES

Save Money by House Sitting on the Road

We have popped this in here as sometimes one can combine both activities - working on the road and getting free accommodation. Most of us only ever think of engaging a house sitter, for whilst we are actually away on the road. It can quite easily work the other way round! You can extend an on the road holiday by taking a break and being able to sleep on a real bed and bathe in a real full size bath! Now this can actually cost you nothing at all. You do need a MINIMUM up front fee of $185.00 to join House Sitters Australia. For some odd reason they charge you a lot more for "popular areas" such as inner city. This gives you a listing in their printed directory and inclusion in their lists emailed on request only to house owners in their own immediate area. You can apply for this online. Rather oddly very few sitters have email addresses making it difficult to easily screen quickly via email.

Bit of a funny website in that you can do everything online EXCEPT find a sitter. Also rather odd as it seems to be an Internet based service, that they are still wasting trees printing out booklets, and of course as we all know, the Internet is fairly instant with responses! Remember, you do not get paid for sitting and you usually have to pay for electricity and the phone. However, it can make a wonderful break in your touring schedule and put off a bit longer those urges we all get after a while, to be inside brick walls once more. The testimonials pages on the site are a little disappointing, as the email addresses of the respondents have been crossed out so you can't easily double check for yourself. There are lots of press reviews to help you make up your mind but again rather oddly none mention the points we have raised here. Australian House Sitters also have a bond system in operation. It's not made at all clear on the site just how this works, but by reading the letters it would appear that they are the stake holders and apart from covering damage, it acts as a way of ensuring that you pay for electricity etc. Not all house owners by the way insist that you pay for electricity as really it is needed for security and in some cases pool maintenance. The circulation of the magazine is not stated anywhere so you don't know exactly what to expect for your $185.00. They do have a free phone on 1800 502 002.

You can order the directory by filling out a simple form online

Happy House Sitters

Doing a quick search in Google brings up as the first entry Happy House Sitters. Now before we start, this is a really weird site in that it opens a new browser for each page you visit! It is very hard to navigate and hard on the eyes. The costs of joining ranges from $250.00 to $400.00. Once again there is absolutely no way of verifying the testimonials (very few anyway on this site). There is no mention of a printed book and once again no list available online. Be aware that this is NOT a secure site if you enter in your credit card details.

House Carers.com.au

Again this one comes up in Google and is quite a nice site at http://www.housecarers.com.au/. Why call yourself house carers and have a different web name? Nevertheless, it is the best by far of all we researched, and it is a very professional put together site that actually works. Trying to enroll though is a bit weird as the first word in every field says "contains". It does nothing! Yes folks you can actually view a list of sitters on line and actually email some of them. As a sitter you can have a free 2 months trial after which you must pay US$29.00 per year to remain listed. Once again though there is no way of checking out testimonials! You become a "gold" member once you pay and your name moves up the list. This really is a global site and you can find positions all over the world. We really liked the way that you can get into your details at anytime and change or update them - a great idea.

The Campervan and Motorhome Club option

If you are a CMCA member and prefer sitting for fellow motorhomers, then the place to look is in the classified section (Members Market) simply by clicking on the link above. You will find the House Sitting ads right at the end of the motorhome listings. If you want to advertise you can do this for just $20.00 per issue. This is a lot cheaper than joining Australian House Sitters, plus your name goes in the Wanderer Magazine plus you get 24 hours a day exposure on the Internet as the CMCA is a very high traffic site. The choice is yours!

Summing Up

This is a great idea for some motorhomers. However, some of these options are just too dear for retired motorhomers and to some could appear as rip offs. We are concerned that you can't check testimonials, there is no info on circulation of printed directories and does the Rental Bond Board get involved with "free" bond holding services? We would like to see a star type rating system introduced for sitters similar to how Ebay let you assess the "worthiness" of sellers by letting you view verifyable Emails of praise and moans - a fantastic system. It would nice t be able to actually email both sitters and home owners for references. We leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions, but invite motorhomers to email us their experiences for inclusion on this page. Our private view is the CMCA wins hands down, but we could of course be a bit biased as we have met many CMCA house sitters!