David Rose is sitting in the spring sunshine outside a spacious four-bedroom villa in Monte Seco, on the Algarve. Beyond the newly enlarged swimming pool, fringed with banana palms, the land is steeply terraced and planted with orange and lemon trees that groan with fruit. “We were sunbathing naked a couple of days ago,” he says cheerfully. Apart from feeding the owner’s King Charles spaniel, Tigi, and watering a few plants, Rose and his wife, Mirabelle, both in their early sixties and semi-retired, are paying nothing for the experience.
“The owner is worried about security during the low season, so it suits her to have us here,” says Rose, who has a website (ramblingrose.eu) that describes the couple’s rent-free travels across Europe. “We plan to stay here for a few months before heading to another villa near Rome during May and June, to look after cats, then we’re looking after a puppy in a house on Lake Geneva in August. People know they can leave their homes and their pets in our hands without worrying, and we love living in different houses at absolutely no cost to ourselves.”
Welcome to the rapidly expanding world of house-sitting. The Roses are part of a growing network of homeowners and sitters who meet on matchmaking websites such as the UK-based trustedhousesitters.com. Owners pay a fee of £9 a month or £40 a year to have their properties listed — by area only, for security reasons — and can search a growing list of sitter profiles by age, status, location and pet-care credentials, as well as reading references (sitters are advised to have a criminal-records check) and reviews from other homeowners.
At a stroke, we got rid of the mortgage, council tax, all our utility bills — and a lot of our possessions It’s an arrangement that seems to suit everybody.
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Owners enjoy peace of mind while they’re away (“Most insurance policies won’t cover homes left empty for more than 30 days,” says the website’s founder, Andrew Peck) and sitters — often retirees, or those who don’t need an income, as no money changes hands — enjoy playing house in a vast range of properties, from country piles to bijou flats in central London. The catch?
You’ll probably have to share the fantasy with the owner’s ancient chihuahuas/spaniels/bengal cats — which is why most sitters describe themselves as “dedicated pet lovers”.
The Roses began house-sitting four years ago when they swapped their home in Kent for a camper van, and now describe it as a way of life. “At a stroke, we got rid of the mortgage, council tax, all our utility bills — and a lot of our possessions.” Their first house-sit was a four-month stay over winter at a mountain retreat in the Cévennes, southern France. “Mirabelle was washing sheets in cold mountain water,” Rose recalls. “We adored it because it was beautiful and isolated. But you have to be careful. Last year, we looked after an enormous house on the Costa Brava, and the owners rang from England every day, asking things like: ‘Could you change the beds because 12 people are coming for the weekend...’ You suddenly realise that you’re not so much a house-sitter as an unpaid caretaker/housekeeper.”
Mindmyhouse.com is a global house- sitting site based in New Zealand. Launched in 2005, it has thousands of registered properties all over the world and is frequented by “career sitters”. Posts to its forum address the knotty issues of house-sit etiquette. Do you lock away personal papers? (Mostly “yes”.) And, as no fees are involved, how much are sitters expected to do? Some are happy to answer the phone, forward mail and do odd jobs. Most simply feel obliged to leave the home “sparkling” on the owner’s return.
Angela Laws, 64 and her husband, John, 66, a retired engineer, describe themselves as “passionate animal-lovers who enjoy the occasional G&T, relaxing with a book or a game of Scrabble”. Not surprisingly, they are much in demand. Over the past four years, they’ve house-sat a dozen properties in six countries. At the moment, Angela is in Brisbane for six weeks, before heading off to New Zealand. They then have a sit together in Wiltshire in May, and have their sights set on a home in New York State for the summer. “It is a cost-effective way of travelling,” she says. “And the beauty of it is that you have control over who you engage to look after your own home.”
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Angela met the people sitting her own house in Vancouver the day before she left for Brisbane. By her own admission, she has “borderline OCD”, so how on earth does she cope with having complete strangers in her home, possibly putting their muddy feet on her sofa? “I expect a lot,” she says. “I am cleanliness personified. But I think, if someone walks into your home and finds it spotless, they will leave it spotless. In the end, this is an arrangement based on trust.”
Anthony Brooks-Daw, a retired architect, and his wife, Judy, both in their early seventies, are heading to Australia for several months, leaving their barn conversion in south Devon — and their two whippets, Jethro and Zak — in the hands of an Australian couple they’ve never met. Brooks-Daw seems delightfully laid back about the whole thing. “Within 24 hours of posting a picture of our house on trustedhousesitters.com, we were inundated with inquiries,” he says. “We had emails from a writer, an American professor and a judge, but we just liked the sound of these two.” There’s been some email correspondence, but he hasn’t checked their references. “Have I put away personal stuff? Oh, um, no... I wouldn’t like them to feel we didn’t trust them,” he says jovially. “I like to think that people are basically morally okay, don’t you?”
Adèle Barclay, managing director of a long-established traditional company, Homesitters (homesitters.co.uk), which typically charges owners £37 a day, with £1 a day on top for each pet, is aghast. “I think it’s extraordinary to ask a stranger into your home and give them the run of the place,” she says. “I just don’t see how any right-thinking person would do it. You’re leaving them with your most intimate possessions.”
Homesitters employs 900 sitters, selected on the basis of “maturity, integrity and pet history”. They’re paid £9.50 a day (plus 33p for each pet and a £7 daily food allowance) and monitored throughout their “career”. Sitters are local and are expected not to leave the house for more than three consecutive hours. “Some have been with us 15 years,” Barclay says. “It’s all about personal chemistry with the client.” And perhaps more important, the pets. “We’ll take a minutely detailed history of the labrador’s health... Also, I like to think we recruit sitters with flexibility, who, if a client phones to say, ‘Would you mind putting my son’s washing through the machine?’, would reply, ‘Of course.’”
George Rose (no relation), 50, a financier, and his wife, Louise, 46, a former air hostess, fell into house-sitting by accident, when friends of friends asked them to look after their French farmhouse in Tarn-et-Garonne for three weeks last summer. They enjoyed it so much, they now plan to turn professional.
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“We were complete beginners,” says Rose, who took on general maintenance at the house, “and we had to keep an eye on the chickens, but we could see there were enormous benefits for both sides.” The couple had the run of a beautifully decorated five-bedroom home, set in seven acres of grounds, and with an outdoor pool; in turn, they communicated regularly by email with the owners, checking on what jobs they might want doing around the place, and passing on any vital news. They are now working out their next overseas move.
“House-sitting is how we’ll spend our retirement,” says Rose. “We can’t wait.”
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David and Mirabelle Rose began housesitting four years ago and keep a journal at www.ramblingrose.eu . To give you a taster as to what their nomadic life is like, here are the 2011 extracts from David's online journal:
January 2011
January continued bitterly cold and very damp. The split charger on the vehicle failed on a shopping trip to Tesco so I made a big effort to sort this and finish off a lot of other winter weather work on the vehicle. The prospect of snow on our drive down to Portugal (our next destination) was a real one. It was almost an Irish cliche that the snow chains I had ordered a month before (from the UK) were finally tracked to Athens having got there via Dublin and Beirut. It took four weeks to get a pair of Michelin tyres delivered from Dublin. By contrast a new split charger, couriered by Kirwan Marine a chandlery on the Shannon even before I had paid for it, arrived the next day. The unit is the latest intelligent technology and showed engine and leisure batteries needed changing. There was no chance of finding decent replacements without braving skiddy roads to Limerick. Sadly, the local garage owner in Kilrush said people wanted cheap everything. Kirwan Marine scored again with Mrs Kirwan meeting us on the road to Rosslare on our departure day on January 17 with a control unit for the charger which I thought was a good idea. We left in the evening after a day of thick fog with a blustery Irish Channel ahead.
The weather was worse in Wales and we stopped over at neary Tenby, a pleasant discovery at two in the morning. We were late leaving after walking around most of the day in pouring rain saving time by shopping there instead of Whitstable or Canterbury in Kent. We left in the evening braving a Met Office Serious Weather Warning. Once again, we arrived at our destination in the early hours, this time an industrial estate in Tunbridge Wells where an alternative set of snow chains was waiting for us to collect after four hours sleep.
Being in transit is always a rush but this one has was the most telling. We saw my parents and sister only and decided to head off to Dover late in the evening to catch an earlier boat. We recently discovered the beaches, particularly Stella Plage past Boulogne-sur-Mer are magnificent, peaceful places in which to stop for the night. I know the coast well from spending a winter there some years ago taking winter tourism brochure shots. The Nord Pas de Calais region is a huge contrast to bustling Kent. I had received an email earlier in the month from my friend Bela in Tankerton asking when we were passing through and that we should meet. I e-mailed my apologies somewhere in central France but received no reply. Sadly and regretably I received news from friends two weeks later that he had died.
I am unable to post a picture of Bela as a tribute, since another disaster, inconsequential by comparison, was losing all my pictures on a hard drive failure. A kind and generous Hungarian, philosopher, physicist and wit who did not deserve the many problems he had through his life, not the least being the cancer that took him.
February 2011
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It started to hot up during the day through February. Here the house-owner's dog, left in our charge while she was in England, has just been given a warm bath by Mirabelle. We worked quickly over the first two weeks on essential gardening. Everything was overgrown and flower buds were appearing. The smells while cutting banana (there are several bunches on the tree), lemon and Seville orange trees, oleander, bouganvillier, various palms, fig and so on are a treat. By the end of the month we were sunbathing daily by the pool having also power-washed most of the patios. The daytime temperature reached 26.5 degrees when there was still very cold air across northern Europe. E-mail of the sort "how's your weather" are not received graciouly for ever by friends and family! The first couple of times they are a novelty
Trips out along the Algarve were limited to food shopping and DIY (I made several recommendations on lighting and security for the house that the owner was pleased with).The section west of Faro is not the prettiest on the Algarve, we discovered, having been spoilt a couple of year's ago by the Alentajo National Park on the Atlantic side. Many people (Brits) we bumped into in the shops - and there are a lot of Brits down here - recommended Lagos and beyond, towards Cape St Vincent for the coves and cliffs of the brochures. We will do this during March. We received an email out of the blue, as one says, from an ex-neighbour in Kent saying, as pleased as Punch, she was house-sitting in Portugal and where were we? We were in the next valley, I replied and soon met up. She showed us the section of beach she and her friend and dog go for a regular walk. At least we were led to a beach around the half-finished gold courses and urbanicaziones. It is hard going without a guide. We have only met up a couple of times since a flu bug towards the end of the month meant we kept a low profile.
March 2011
It is approaching the end of the month and the weather is rapidly turning into a full-blown Spring with peach blossom and fig leaves out and avocados in abundance on the lower terrace. We have discovered more walks, led by the dog, and found the abandoned old village of Monte Seco on the other side of this mountain. It is a much more peaceful side with views of valleys to the north with no habitation. We have almost finished power-washing the patios and are ticking off a list of minor jobs including matching the exterior light bulbs to a warmer colour than stark white. Our friends house-sitting near Almancil have returned to northern Europe and are already missing the Portuguese sunshine and relaxed pace of things. It depends how you see it. We still have no telephone or proper Internet and the Vodaphone racked up over 100 Euros last month for e-mail only - maybe the odd Windows up-date and talking book download. I don't think it will be sorted before our provisional departure date of 10 May. We have met more ex-Pats, including the owner of a letting property on the other side of the village who would like us to house-sit for her in December and January. A choice we like. We have no bookings for May and June and are heading back to the UK via nice beaches up the western edge.
The weather deteriorated in the second week of the month and the pool (below) actually overflowed after days of torrential rain. We stopped moaning about it this weekend after seeing catastrophic earthquake and tsunami pictures on the other side of the world. Once again, it put our situation in perspective. We have about five more weeks in the Algarve and are finishing various self-imposed tasks that include cleaning the patios and burning the mountain of pruning and cuttings. Most of the flowers are out now including Jasmine, orange and lemon, peach blossom and several I don't know the names of. I'm also busy looking at things that need doing to the motor home. I hope the weather improves again sufficiently for us to paint the vehicle. We have been carrying paint around Europe with us for the last two years.
As can be the nature of house-sitting, in two days of e-mail exchange with an English language newspaper on the Algarve about local house-sitting (no article was published) we went from no bookings beyond April to being fully-booked until mid-October. The house-sit site Trusted HouseSitters, thinks they will be able to arrange a UK Sunday newspaper mention. They are convinced we would get fixed up with something "fantastic and exciting" from such exposure! We shall see. As long as it is not a palace in Tunisia or Libya to look after. We have followed these dramatic events of recent weeks with great sympathy for the people and have been reminded on a daily basis how lucky we are.