I live in an enormous yet unique place called The Villages (yes we have our own zip code). It is 60 square miles, 150,000 residents. People do searches specifically for The Villages in order to come here and enjoy our amenities and live music 365 days a year. I feel a search should result in all the specific Villages listings, but no. Some listings get buried in between local nearby town listings. For example there can be a listing for The Villages, then one for Mt. Dora, Clermont, Ocala and so on, these are 30+ miles away. I donât mind if you put these âafterâ all the Villages listings, but donât bury what my potential sitter is searching for.
Oh, and when I did research on here, I saw someone complain that when they have a saved search for a specific city, they are getting notifications for cities âoutsideâ of that city but nearby.
That is my vent, I think Iâm justified to be annoyed with this platform.
I agree, the Location settings and searches do not work well. Several times Iâve searched my area and not even been able to find my own listing. That said, it may be THSâs way of helping less popular sits (like mine) get found. If only specifically searched areas showed up some of us would never find sitters. No one is ever going to search for my unknown town of 250 people but itâs a lovely, peaceful place only 15 minutes drive from popular and expensive beaches, wine tasting, redwoods, etc. So for me it probably is helpful that they do this.
Best thing you can do is make your listing as appealing as possible and your location as clear as possible, maybe in your title, to stand out from the others. You may also be happily surprised to reach a wider audience - sitters who donât even know about The Villages but turn out to be a perfect fit.
I received a reply from THS Support that might apply to this post and why your listing is not showing as the specific city/local. I questioned a listing that was actually in a small city (50K residents) but listed as being in a larger city (675K residents) that was 25m away. THS Support stated that they do this as a default on their end, so it protects the residents identity. Think itâs a âsafetyâ mechanism that isnât really beneficial for either party.
When I signed up as a HO, the instructions were to NOT put your location as where you actually live but rather a nearby town. Since this is a sparsely populated area with little risk of someone coming all the way out here to check us out, I left our exact location in place.
If Iâm looking for a specific place, I always make sure the âsort byâ filter is set to âdistanceâ instead of ârecommendedâ or ânewest,â otherwise it will show me all sorts of jumbled sits from miles away But usually I just search by map dragging.
I must admit that, as a sitter, I donât mind it. On the contrary, sometimes I find it helpful because if the search is very specific I may get no results and if I get nearby locations I didnât even know that existed, I can do some research and become interested in them. That way I get to know new areas, often off the beaten track and I enjoy that.
But usually I just search by map dragging.