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Why doesn't the home owner respond to my message?

Please be assured that your messages are being sent to home owners.

Competition for the longer house sitting assignments is so keen that home owners can often feel deluged by responses. That is no excuse for them not showing you the courtesy of acknowledging your application or politely turning your offer down.

We have written two short articles on home owner etiquette in different editions of MindMyHouse News that you can see at the following URLs:

http://www.mindmyhouse.com/community/blog/news/mindmyhouse-news-09-feburary-2014/

http://www.mindmyhouse.com/community/blog/news/mindmyhouse-news-22-july-2006/

We realise how important it is for house sitter members to hear back from home owners regarding their applications. We currently have several mechanisms in place to encourage our home owner members to acknowledge every message they receive through our site, including email templates. We send out regular email reminders to all home owners asking them if they have found a sitter. We also automatically hide their listing at the beginning of their sitter assignment dates, or thirty days after the listing was approved, if it's a listing with variable dates.

To encourage home owners to reply to your messages to them it's a good idea to create your own sitter available listing complete with three nice photos of your choosing. Until you create your own listing, home owners can't add you to their Shortlist of favourite house sitter candidates. Having a listing on our site will show home owners that you are a real person who deserves a reply!

Also, we have a feature that allows you to see if the home owner have read your application. This was released in May 2017, so it doesn't apply to messages sent before then. You can do this by going to your Message Centre, sent folder and check the 'Read by owner' column in your email list:

https://www.mindmyhouse.com/sitters/messages/sent