Hi! Sorry if this has been asked before but here is my situation. I will be listing my house soon for a future long sit (94 days) but am traveling internationally in a few days where I will not have reliable WiFi access for about 2 weeks. When I return at the end of November, I was planning on listing my house, but there will only be 6 weeks until I need the house sitter. Is that enough time to post/communicate and lock in a potential house sitter? Or should I put up my listing now and potentially upset some interested house sitters because I won’t be able to respond until I return? Thanks in advance for your advice!
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Hi @fosterfailure and welcome to the forum! The decision is ultimately up to you about when to post your six week sit, but the sooner you do it the better. Longer sits do get jumped on quickly so you probably won’t have a hard time but I have also noticed you have not paid for your membership yet (unlless it just hasn’t registered yet) and I can’t see where you are located. I would do that right away. You won’t be able to post the dates here on the forum so you want to get it onto the TrustedHousesitters site soon, even if you don’t have the dates set yet. You can always go in and add those dates at a later time.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask anyone on the forum or one of the team for assistance.
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Definitely it doesn’t make sense to list your sit if you are not able to respond within 1-2 days (this will only frustrate potential sitters). For the second part of the question: it really depends! Long sits are much sought after but I don’t know about your location / pets. If you have a small menagerie in the countryside it’s more difficult than if you have an easy cat close to the beach.
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It will be counterproductive not to be able to check your applications & reply to sitters but maybe if you make this situation clear when you write your listing, it might help applicants; they will know not to expect replies or wonder why you haven’t read messages.
You will only get a maximum of 5 applicants before the listing is paused, so you won’t get inundated anyway.
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I agree with @Saltrams. Posting sooner is better, as long as you communicate well. In this case, “well” means letting them know you won’t be able to communicate from dates X to Y. The advantage to posting sooner is that a sitter might say, “Oh, this sit looks right up my alley. I’m willing to wait until the HO gets back to talk more. Good thing I didn’t book something else in the meantime.”
It’s also possible you’ll have more WiFi access than you think. You might be able to email every few days, which gives you a non-hurry chance to get to know your applicants better.
Though as people have noted, six weeks is probably long enough as people covet the long sits. But as long as you’re clear in the posting about your availability, I don’t think you’ll upset any sitters. At least none that you would want sitting your house. =)
Good luck!
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Hi everyone! Thanks so much for your helpful suggestions. I went ahead and created a listing and added a note that we’ll be traveling and will reply when we return. Fingers crossed. Thanks for making this so easy
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