Hello! I’m a new HO, and I’ve gone through a lot of the topics in this forum, and I see so much good advice, so THANKS! I’ve adapted my profile to try and address the sitter suggestions to make our home more interesting for someone(s), but I’m hoping that you all might take a look and give me any more suggestions on enticing sitters?
We have had many house/pet sitters over the years in our previous home, and I’ve also done house/pet sitting and more than my fair share of AirBnB stays, so I think I know what constitutes a great situation from both ends, but we are really new to the area we live and don’t have a large network of friends here yet. I’m really worried about finding someone to take care of things.
We’ve only been live a few days, and I’m tweaking the listing almost every day based on your feedback/comments to others, but I’ve only gotten 4 “save” folks and no offers to sit. Should I reach out with an invite? Do I need more pictures? Better descriptions? Help, please?
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Hello @Vanny61 & welcome. Am sure you can find a lovely sit or pair of sitters. A few initial thoughts would be to put a cute pic of the two dogs up first as they’re the focus and will grab attention. Lose some of the cat pics, 1 or 2 of an animal is enough. Do your sitters need a car and/or can you lend them a car? Add “car needed” or “car included” into your listing as that’s a filter sitters use. Clearly a car would be fab if you could lend one. Trim back the responsibilities to about 25%, it looks overwhelming but isn’t. All that extra detail goes in the welcome guide for the confirmed sitter and could look too much at skim read. Could you take a family as you have two bedrooms and bathrooms? If so add the family friendly tag too as that opens the pool of sitters as well. Unfortunately invites don’t work usually, you can try but applying sitters are normally the easiest to secure. Hope that helps, am sure more forum members will have some advice too 
Thank you @Cuttlefish ! Can do on the responsibilities portion-it’s hard to know where everything should go, so the advice is good. I’ll also move dog photo up. Im starting to really understand the website name is a little off topic of what the purpose has evolved into.
Car will not be available (we’re driving to Canada to catch our flight), but I can definitely chip in some $ toward a rental for a sitter. I will include that info.
I’ll think about family-our pets have very little experience with children, and I wouldn’t want to leave that kind of thing to chance.
I totally agree with Cuttlefish, the photo of the two dogs or the one where your Dachshund is dancing on hind legs would be a great main pic. Do you have any pictures of the area with the leaves in fall colors? I know the NE is a big draw for leaf peepers. Other than that, I think your listing looks great. Hopefully you’ll get great applicants soon.
Welcome @Vanny61
Agree with what’s been said in that your first few pics should be of your dogs and cats.