MindMyHouse News

To say that the web guy, Alan (aka. Pop), has been busy building new site features over the winter down here in the Southern hemisphere, is an understatement. Scroll through this newsletter to the end to skim read the subtitles to get an idea of where we have fine tuned your experience of our service, based on your feedback to us. See how it works? Amazing how this online community grows in such a symbiotic way.

As always, Alan would love to read honest feedback about your use (good and bad) of the technical elements of our service, just for his reference and to keep on with his tinkering work. 

Free lifetime home owner membership add-on special offer for our house sitter members!

House sitters, interested in becoming a home owner as well? Well, we are giving away free lifetime home owner memberships to add on to your annual house sitter account with us. To become a dual member with us, just click on the ‘Register’ link from the ‘Home Owners’ menu and you’re away (not literally!).

Please note – you must be logged in to your house sitter account first before you click this link.

Bring My Reputation

Are you a member of another house sitting or pet sitting website (like Trusted House Sitters)? Here at MindMyHouse we’re introducing…drumroll…a new feature called ‘Bring My Reputation’. 

Instead of starting from scratch, we can now add your reviews/testimonials from verified websites such as Trusted House Sitters, Nomador etc to your account here at MindMyHouse! We think this is a great idea, but what do you think? Judging by the enthusiastic uptake already on this new feature, you agree with us…

But wait, it gets better! As well as being able to display all your written testimonials from happy home owners and/or house sitters in your account here at MindMyHouse, we now have a way to display the amount of years (in total, including your time using other services) you’ve been busy in this online industry, as well as the total number of your assignments completed. These will all be added to your MindMyHouse account at your request, just click on the following button/link to take a look at the form on our site.

A change to the way house sitter applicants are added & counted

We have just introduced an important change to the way that house sitters are added to the home owners list of Applicants. In some ways, it is a very small change. But it does have an outsized effect, and thus it is important that all of our members understand the impact of this change.

Starting from 1st April 2025, house sitters will not be automatically added to the list of Applicants, if the home owner makes contact first. 

How the Applicants list used to work

If a home owner sent a message to a house sitter, we would automatically add that sitter to the home owners Applicants list, and the ‘number’ of applicants (as shown on the house sitting assignment page) was increased by 1. This led to some very high numbers of house sitter applicants (many of whom didn’t want to apply or weren’t available!).

How the Applicants list now works

If a home owner sends a message to a house sitter, the house sitter will not be automatically added to the home owners Applicants list, and the ‘number’ of applicants (shown on the house sitting assignment page) will stay as it was. If the house sitter then replies to this message, they can ‘opt in’ to be added to the list of applicants or not. 

To opt in, house sitters just need to tick the checkboxes and assignment dates in their message form, when they click Reply to the home owners message (see image below). 

What about when the house sitter initiates contact (or applies)?

There are no changes – everything will stay the same. For example, if a house sitter clicks on the ‘Apply now’ button, they will still be automatically added to the home owners applicants list, and the ‘number’ of applicants (shown on the house sitting assignment page) will be increased by 1.

We’ve made this change in response to requests from our community, who have asked us to fix the following issues:

• If the home owner initiated contact with the sitter, some sitters would complain that they never actually applied for the assignment, so why should they be on that particular applicant list (?)
• In this previous scenario, some home owners would also complain that their applicant list count would end up way too high.
• You asked for it – we delivered. Let us know what you think.

Missing Testimonials?

This is (we think) a great new addition to your MindMyHouse account! When you next visit the ‘Testimonials’ section in your account, in the right hand column, we will now show you if you are missing any testimonials. This includes testimonials that you should have received when the assignment was completed (but missed out on receiving), and also testimonials you should have written (but missed out on sending). Testimonials are a key way to get a good response on MindMyHouse from other members, so make sure your list of received and sent testimonials is all up to date! We strongly suggest that you log into your account now, and see if you need to do this.

New fields for sitter wanted listings: Parking; Site access; and Home Owner personality profile

Dear members: you also asked us for three new fields for our sitter wanted listings: Parking, Site access and Home Owner personality profile. Now added!

House sitters can now see at a glance if there is room to park their vehicle at a property. We ask home owners whether they have off-street parking and/or whether any available onstreet parking requires a permit and/or a daily fee to be paid.  

The new Property Access field is the place where home owners can describe any challenges with access to the property, such as steep hills, steps, slippery driveways, narrow bridges, walk-in access only etc. We are sure this new at-a-glance information will come in handy! 

The new ‘Home Owner personality profile’ field is optional for home owners to fill out. So keep in mind that you might not see this field in every listing. We thought this suggestion from our members is a great inclusion! Here, home owners can tell sitters a bit about themselves, so that sitters can see if they have possibly found a good match with home owners in terms of shared Life philosophies and all of that good stuff…

New fields for our ‘sitter available’ listings 

Preferred regions

House sitters: you also asked for a new field to indicate where your preferred regions are, if you only are available to sit in one country. For example, if a sitter is seeking assignments in the United States, but only wants to house sit on the west coast, they can add this important information to the new ‘Preferred regions’ field in their listings. We hope this comes in handy!

Do I charge for house sitting – details/conditions?

If you happen to be one of our sitters who sometimes charges for your services, we have now added a new text field where you can add some details. Maybe you only charge when you travel, or if the assignments involve farming or hosting work? This is a ‘free text’ field, so you are welcome to add any details here to explain what you are expecting from home owners, or how charging works for you. 

Features comparison 

We have put together a comparison list of features below of the most popular house sitting websites, so that you can see how MindMyHouse compares to our competitors. We know that some of our members are also members of these other sites. We’d be interested to know what you think about your use of our competitor sites, to help us to improve what it is that we offer our members. If you spot any mistakes in any of this information, please let us know 🙂

View features comparison

Message Centre

We’ve tweaked the Message Centre, fixing a few pernickety bugs and making some minor improvements in usability. If you have ever been slightly frustrated when accessing your personal Inbox on MindMyHouse via your phone, et voila!, now we are rocking and rolling. Try to read your messages on our site from your phone again and see what we mean. 

Account Notifications

Account notification messages can now be dismissed. This was requested by one of our members, and it makes total sense because once you’ve read our handy reminders (‘I need to make my listing visible’, for example) you probably don’t need to read it again 🙂 Why didn’t we think of it? Of course, you can unhide and then re-read this handy user advice from us at your leisure.

Sprichst du Deutsch? ¿Hablas Español? Parles-tu Français?

If you speak another language apart from English, why not make this work to your advantage with other members who might appreciate language matching. To fill out this field, go to ‘My Account Details’ and look for the field ‘What Languages do you Speak?’ Go for it!

Home owners – you can now search for sitters by language!

House sitters – home owners can now search for you by language, so make sure you add your spoken languages to your account page.

Phew! That about wraps it up.