Sitter Statistics: Average number of house-sits

Sitter Questions, Advice & Chat
1

When I apply for a house-sit I’m often inquisitive about who else is applying. Of course it is not really possible to know – even when I’ve asked home owners about who else applied, their responses have been guarded.

THS does not publish any interesting information about numbers of home owners or number of pet sitters, but there is a bit of information available for anyone willing to invest some time. To scratch my itch to know a bit more about the profile of my competition for house-sits, I analyzed pet-sitter profiles.

To get data I clicked on “Find a pet sitter”. In the “Explore sitter profiles” pages I copied the sitters’ name(s), country, and number of completed house-sits, into an Excel spreadsheet. I copied data from 528 profiles (i.e. 22 screens x 24 profiles per screen), then sorted them and eliminated 25 duplicates. The result is 503 unique house-sitter profiles. I imagine this to be a sufficiently large sample to be representative of THS’ current population of house-sitters, but I cannot be sure because I do not know whether the website randomly picks profiles or whether there is an algorithm or other filter in the background.

Bits of information I found interesting are:

Measures of the number of completed house-sits per pet-sitter:

Average: 11.7 (Wow! This large number surprised me!)

Median: 5 (When I did a similar exercise about 3 years ago, this number was 3. The larger number is an indicator that the experience level / quality of house-sitters has improved)

Mode: Zero (Yes, there are still plenty of newcomers to the site, with no completed house-sits)

Of the 503 profiles, 224 (44%), had two names in the profile, i.e. couples. (This is not the “dual sitter” feature, this is just 2 names on the profile).

Countries where pet-sitters are located:

UK 31%

US 12%

Australia 10%

Germany 7%

Spain 6%

France 5%

Netherlands 4%

Canada 3%

New Zealand 3%

Italy 3%

Ireland 3%

Portugal 2%

Switzerland 1%

Brazil 1%

Czech Rep. 1%

Sweden 1%

Austria 1%

Poland 1%

South Africa 1%

Greece 1%

Other countries, less than 0.5% each: Egypt, Finland, Hungary, Japan, Romania, Russia, Belgium, Barbados, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Cyprus, India, Israel, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Vietnam

2

I’m proud to be 2% :rofl:

3

That’s a nice piece of number crunching!
Yes we’re a 2 name couple on my profile (English) because he doesn’t always join me so it’s not worth doing the duo thing.
What’s the average length of time sitters are members I wonder? We have friends who joined 2 years ago they like the idea of sitting but have done zero sits to date. It’s a bit like joining a gym maybe, nice idea then …..

4

Wow, I am impressed with your effort, love a spreadsheet and data. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts::smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

5

What were the highest number of sits on a sitters’s profile in your sample ?

I’ve seen several sitters profile’s with 100+ sits mostly from U.K. which is not surprising as that is where the THS platform started.

6

This is really interesting and I’m impressed with the time you must have taken over this.
Not exactly the same but, in order to set my fees for a paid sitting platform (I’ve recently started doing some in addition to THS) I wrote down the fees of 50 sitters in my area and took the average. That took me long enough so I can’t imagine how long you took!
How long?

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@Ruckusfan, gotta love the enthusiasm for objective data :clap:.
In what country are you based? Guessing UK given location data (given UK 31%).

Most striking data in your analysis is US 12%.
For multiple years, the number of active US listings has been more than half of total active listings. Now 6,465 US listings vs ‘more than 10,000’ global listings.

If US listings exceed 50% but only 12% of housesitters are US then there may be a great many US pet parents with few, if any, applicants to their listings. This reflects trend over recent years for seemingly many international housesitters to expressly avoid US listings.

While a year stale, thread below provides geographic data on listings … and an encouraging nudge that THS focus its marketing spending on Schengen area pet parents. :folded_hands:

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Yay, I have done house sits in 10 of the countries mentioned.

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I would say that there is plenty more in the USA.

On my website the largest demographic of people visiting are from the US and that demographic is 4-5x larger than any other country.

So I would say that the information gathered throught THS was showing local house sitters.

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Thanks @Silversitters , for triggering this idea for additional analyis of my sample:

% of profiles with X completed house-sits:

0 sits: 16%

1 sit: 13%

2 sits: 8%

3 sits: 6%

4 sits: 4%

5 sits: 5%

6 to 10 sits: 14%

11 to 20 sits: 14%

21 to 30 sits: 7%

31 to 40 sits: 4%

41 to 50 sits: 1%

>50 sits: 5%

Profile in my sample with the highest number of sits: 145

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@Smiley: Probably just 5 or 6 hours, all in. (Excel is in my blood!)

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The number for Canada surprised me as I thought it’d be much higher. And it is!

I did a basic search for sitters by country and Canada (and New Zealand) both came up higher, Canada very much so, but the others seemed to align pretty closely with your sample.

Below is your list and percentages but slightly reordered based on returned search results.

UK 31% 10000+

US 12% 10000+

Australia 10% 10000+

Canada 3% 9142

Germany 7% 5394

Spain 6% 3319

France 5% 3048

New Zealand 3% 2779

Netherlands 4% 2049

Italy 3% 1279

Ireland 3% 1266

Switzerland 1% 1083

Portugal 2% 934

Brazil 1% 572

Czech Rep. 1% 477

(I stopped here.)

13

What an interesting post!

I’d love one that shows us how many members per country - both sitters and HO’s.

We fit right in the middle there with nearly 30 sits in 8 countries and 16 of those sits were in the US.

I’d love more sit options in Central and S America and more in countries outside the UK

14

For fun, I also searched for only sitters with member reviews from the top nine countries to see if I could roughly calculate the actual number of sitters in the 10000+ countries.

It only helped with Australia. The total number of sitters in Australia is around 12000 (assuming a generous 35% have no member reviews).

Country # sitters / # with member reviews - % with zero member reviews

UK 10000+ / 10000+

US 10000+ / 10000+

Australia 10000+ / 7867

Canada 9142 / 6172 - 33%

Germany 5394 / 3336 - 38%

Spain 3319 / 2053 - 38%

France 3048 / 1807 - 41%

New Zealand 2779 / 1598 - 42%

Netherlands 2049 / 1283 - 37%

15

I was also surprised as I’m a sitter in Canada.

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I have completed 63 sits in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland since December 2023, so that’s a period of 2.5 years, and my last sit as a member will be in July this year, then I am out, all because of the booking fees.

As you can imagine in that time I built up a great list of contacts, so I no longer need the middleman of this site, but it was good while it lasted.

I don’t mind short sits, if they are local and can become repeat sits.

17

@Ruckusfan, interesting data. smells about right. thank you for analysis.

We now have 70+ housesits and newbie pet parents tend to squint confused at our odd lifestyle. Until we briefly explain the underlying rationale and diverse destinations. carpe diem :grinning_face:

Wonder what the equivalent metrics are for pet parents?

18

Wonder what the equivalent metrics are for pet parents?

Now that’s the next challenge :wink:

19

Just curious, any data on length of sits?