Things are starting to pick up around here as we approach our 4 month anniversary since going online Feb 2009. Traffic is increasing, Connections between Home Owners and House Sitters are constantly being made daily.
I will be doing some site improvements in the next few weeks and doing a redesign of the site to give it a more personable, but yet professional appearance, These things take time. Bottom line is this, I'm here to help you, and use of the site is 100% Free for Everyone!
With that said, we have 475 Registered House Sitters on the site from all over the world, but half of you have failed to fill out your profile information telling the Home and Pet Owners about YOU, and what you bring to the table. Home Owners want to know as much detail about you as possible before they decide to contact and interview you. Your profile is your online resume!
We currently have 81 registered Home Owners, Not all Home Owners are going to post their House Sits in the Classifieds section, most the Home Owners on here only register so they can Contact some of the Registered House Sitters in their area. so if you're not registered as a House Sitter and filled out your profile, how do you expect to pick up any Jobs? Fill out your Profiles People!! If you need any help Please contact me, I'll be happy to assist you.
One of the biggest Concerns hiring a House or Pet Sitter is Background Checks, I have been actively exploring many options in regards to this to assist Home and Pet Owners in their selection process.
Many of those Online "BackGround Check" services you find online are old and outdated, and often provide stale or inaccurate information, Lucky for me, I live in a State (Idaho) that allows anyone to search for a person by name and find all Criminal and Civil information on me. But not all States are this transparent, but they should be!
One option I'm considering, is to have Registered House and Pet Sitters snail mail me their original Background check documents, So I can personally verify they are "Clear" and assign a special membership tag on the Sitters profile to indicate this. and then mail the original documents back to the sitters once I have Verified you as having a clean Background. (Yearly) the only cost would be postage at this time This would only be Optional, but will Provide more credibility and assist the Home Owner in their review and selection process.
Your other option is to upload a copy of your Background Check here, assign special viewing permissions to it, so only the people you want to see it, can review it online, as Peter and Anne have done so here, click the pic, and it will enlarge it so it's readable.
and lastly, Please check your spam/trash folders for system notification emails from HouseSitters.com, as I mentioned before, this site is new so a lot of ISP's (Internet Service Providers) and 3rd party email clients such as Hotmail.com and Yahoo.com block my system messages and flag them as spam as I'm not yet firmly establish. so I've been notifying some of you manually that Home Owners are trying to contact you. so please check your email here often.
Recently there was also a New York Times article about House Sitting that featured one of our members, but no mention of my site yet 
Story can be found here, and the members they featured is located here
Again, if you need any help with your profile, or posting an Ad in the classified section, Please Contact me! I'm Here to Help!
If any of you read this, Please give me some feedback on the Background check option I am suggesting, also please give me some suggestions, Ideas, etc.
Tags: News Updates Email Profiles Background Checks
