MindMyHouse News

In this special seasonal edition of MindMyHouse News we are introducing a long awaited upgrade for all of our members. Tadaah! Now is the moment to get excited for the new site features we are calling Availability calendar for sitters and Date filtering for owners. Actually, these two new features are just two sides of the same coin (to use a metaphor) where house sitters say when they’re available (or not) and then home owners can search our database for house sitters who say they’re available at the times they require. We hope that you’ll use these new tools to better hone in on finding those perfect house sitters or that perfect assignment. This could be a big(ish) change in the way you use our service, so please take your time reading through this newsletter to understand how these changes work. And, don’t be shy asking us questions, or suggesting ways these new features could be improved even further 🙂

We also wanted to make a discrete comment on the sizable uproar created by the introduction of what our biggest competitor, Trusted House Sitters, is calling ‘booking fees’.

Oh, and we have a new homepage design (you might have noticed this!) featuring some lovely humans (Susan, the editor, made me ‘oldify’ these charming house sitter characters to better match our demographic) and their furry friends. Note that we’ve kept the same blue sky, water views, fluffy clouds and our signature white dove holding the key in its dear little beak, because we know from your feedback that you love our original cute and friendly branding that doesn’t change over the years…

House sitters availability calendar upgrades, and the new date filter for home owners

OK so bear with me here as I try to explain this new change, which I have worked for many, many hours on at the end of last year, as a way to help our beloved members find the perfect match using our service, in no time at all!

To give you the backstory: I (Alan the POP of the Mom ‘n’ Pop team behind MindMyHouse) noticed that there seemed to be way too many emails going back and forth between our members in our onsite messaging centre, all asking the same question. Owners would write something along the lines of “Are you available on the … of … perchance? Then sitters would reply with something like “Sorry, but I’m away that week…”.  Well, as some of you have said in your correspondences to us, this feels a bit repetitive and could the site be streamlined a little better to avoid all these same-same questions?.

The solution? Add an Availability calendar, so that sitters can precisely mark in a calendar the days that are unavailable (or busy). We already had something like this, but it obviously wasn’t working very well. On the other side of the coin, we realised that we needed to give home owners the ability to filter out sitters who aren’t available from their searches, for the days they needed someone. Right? 

OK, we are now happy to announce that this new filtered way of searching is now a thing! Yay! Now, let’s explain how it all works.

House Sitters new availability calendar

You will find a new page in your account area, titled ‘My availability calendar’, where you can add the days you are unavailable or busy (these are marked in pink in the screenshot below). We will also automatically mark out your ‘booked’ dates (ie. your upcoming assignments – these are marked in blue in the screenshot below). We will also show your calendar in your ‘sitter available’ listing. Also, we have already imported your previously stated ‘dates unavailable’ into this new calendar format.

House Sitters: You can access your availability calendar either from the ‘Edit my listing’ page, or from the new ‘My availability’ page (link below):

https://www.mindmyhouse.com/sitters/my_availability

Home Owners new date filter

Home owners will find a new ‘My dates’ filter on the sitter search page (screenshot below). Just add the dates you will be away, and we will only show you sitters who are available for your dates. Voila! 

This will help both house sitters, and home owners immensely (or so we hope). It also brings our service more in line with other house sitting websites, in terms of how they work.

Why didn’t we do this before? Hmm. When questioned about this (under an investigative spotlight), I’ll confess and say that I was too busy watching Stranger Things, Series 5…

As always, we would love to read your honest feedback, about the calendar (good and bad), or even ideas on how we can improve it. I will be tinkering with the design (in particular, trying to improve the mobile user experience), so any of our members’ comments will be welcome at this phase in the development process.

Sitters – hang on, what about my “available from” and “available to” dates?

House sitters may be saying at this point, ‘hang on, what about my “available from” and “available to” dates?’ Be assured that these are still there. But we have made an important change to these fields. The important one is the ‘available to’ field – think of this as the date your listing expires and is hidden. We have now given you (venerable house sitters) the ability to indicate your listing has no end date. To do this, just click the ‘clear’ button below the ‘available to’ field (see screenshot below), either in your ‘Edit my listing’ page, or your new ‘My availability’ page.

This way, your ‘sitter available’ listing will never expire, and will always be visible over the life of your membership with us. It also means that we can stop sending you that pesky auto-generated email saying ‘your listing has expired….’.

Now, most of you already have set a ‘available to’ date (because we made this a requirement). So if you want your listing to not expire in the future, please click the ‘clear’ button. Otherwise, you can leave it as is.

Note: these fields (available to and available from) only affect your overall availability! Individual dates can still be marked as unavailable via the ‘My availability calendar’.

Sitters can now search assignments by more continents

You may have already noticed that sitters can search for house sitting assignments listed across the entire continent of Europe (and all of its 44 countries!). This continent is properly known as ‘the Continent’ and thus seems to have cornered the market on being recognised as a conglomeration of independent nation states. Well, Euro-centrism aside, we’ve extended this concept to the other equally important and intriguing land masses on our awesome planet. To this end you can search for assignments across ALL of North America (including the Caribbean); all of South America; all of Asia; all of Africa and, last but not least, all of the Pacific region (including Australia and New Zealand, where we live). These ‘continent-wide searches’ can be set for email alerts as well. One of our members requested this change to us, and we thought, well, why not? Thanks for the suggestion 🙂

Sitter email alert tweak

By popular request, we have also added the ‘available from’ date search filter to sitter email alerts (for house sitting assignments) as another option. Please note that using this will reduce the amount of results you get (to only those assignments that begin after the ‘available from’ date you have set in your email alert, so please use it judiciously. Also, note that at some point, your ‘available from’ date will move into the past and become redundant, which will automatically cancel the alert.

Booking fees over at Trusted House Sitters

Not sure if you have heard the latest scuttlebutt, but one of our biggest competitors recently started charging their own members (both home owners and house sitters) a booking fee of USD$12, for each assignment booked on the site. Wowsa! For the busier members, their yearly membership fee (already eye-wateringly high) could double, or even triple! It’s hard to fathom…

As a result, some of their members have jumped ship (seeking calmer waters perhaps?) and have migrated across to us here at MindMyHouse. So, on behalf of Susan (the Mom and editor of MMH) and I, welcome aboard :). And to our established community of MindMyHousies, please show these newbies the ropes, as required…

Still going with the nautical theme (groan), it’s fair to say that ‘you know who’ (our whale of a competitor) is navigating some stormy weather – if their sinking Trustpilot reviews and the public griping over at Reddit are anything to go by. Their members could now be down in the Doldrums (an area of windless hot steamy ocean, wrapped around the Equator) just thinking on how these new booking fees might start to swell and swamp their boats…

Please be assured that we at MindMyHouse would never charge a booking fee, or indeed, any fee over and beyond the membership signup or renewal charge. Yay for us!

New homepage design and a few tweaks 

We have also refreshed our homepage design – please check it out and let us know what you think. If you can’t see it (ie. the ‘Home’ link on the website takes you to your account Dashboard) try this link instead:

• https://www.mindmyhouse.com/homepage/mmh

We have also added a shortcut to your Inbox (MindMyHouse Message Centre) in the header. This was another great suggestion from one of our members – thanks :).

When do house sitting assignments typically start (ie. the start date)?

OK, I find this interesting, and I thought you might too… See the graph above, which shows a typical year of house sitting assignments at MindMyHouse, plotting the numbers of assignments by starting date, from January to December. Think of this graphic as something akin to the mammalian heartbeat, noting that this shape repeats year after year as our members go about what would seem to be some predictable seasonal activities, which involve leaving home for a while. Notice the peak around December 25, and also the holiday periods of the northern hemisphere summer. It’s also worth noting that we get busier about a month or two before the peaks (on average), which is when the listings will be posted.

Seasons greetings

We would like to leave you with a recent photo of the Pōhutukawa tree as a special seasonal greeting, wherever you are on this wonderful planet. Also known as the New Zealand Christmas tree, this tree is famous for the brilliant display of red flowers right as Christmas approaches, DownUnder in sunny Aotearoa (New Zealand). This particular tree was lovingly captured by me (Alan, your web guy and photographer) here on Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf. It has a close relative (ʻŌhiʻa lehua) on Hawaii and other islands in the Pacific as well.

All the best for 2026!