Should you trust a house-sitter from the internet?

27/06/2024

It's 8am in the Australian bush, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest capital.

Tessa*, a European backpacker, has just returned from a walk in the blistering summer sun.As she rounds the corner of her host's house, her eyes lock on the pool.

Surrounded by high fences, and the bush beyond that, it appears safe from prying eyes."No-one's watching," Tessa recalls her host saying to her before they left."Just go skinny-dipping."

Tessa strips and wades into the water, thinking all the security cameras have been switched off.

House-sitting platforms are connecting sitters and home owners for a fee. But who's responsible when things go wrong?

Tessa's host was basically a stranger, someone she had met through an online platform called Trusted Housesitters.

From a certain perspective, their arrangement seemed almost utopian: Tessa was to look after their house and dog, and in return she got to stay there for free.

Her time in their house was largely uneventful, aside from when the dog bit her on the arm. She stayed a few days, tidied the place up and moved on to her next house-sit.

But a few days after she left, the home owner texted her.

"I feel that you weren't honest with me," they wrote.

They claimed that Tessa's walks with the dog had only been 10 minutes long, door to door.

But if the cameras were turned off, and there were no neighbours in sight, how could they have known?

Tessa is on another house-sit, in Seattle this time, as she talks about her experience in the Australian bush over a video call.

She admits to not walking the dog for long enough, but believes the owner must have spied on her to have known about it.

Tessa looks over her shoulder, and jokes that she's probably being watched by a camera right now, too.

"If I can find them, I just get a little bit of duct tape and cover the lens," she explains.

"I'm probably the least trusting person."

And yet, she continues showing up at the homes of strangers she has met online.

Rather than leaving the platform, Tessa has become extra careful with her vetting. She rules out listings at the first hint of a red flag.

Talking to Tessa, you get the sense that her lifestyle – travelling the world, bouncing from house-sit to house-sit – isn't quite as utopian as it seems.

She relies on a system that's built on trust. But it's less clear what happens when that trust is broken.

Home owners have their own horror stories to share. Over crackly phone connections, they tell of being taken advantage of by misbehaving sitters.

Kasia Potoczny had a family heirloom stolen as part of an apparent house-sitting crime spree across Australia's east coast, perpetrated by a Polish backpacker and her mother.

Elena Bryant returned to Auckland to find her car damaged, her house a "pigsty" and one of her hens rotting in the coop out the back.

In both cases, communication with their sitters had been patchy while they were away. And, by the time they returned home, their sitters were already gone.

What could be done?

Neither had much in the way of evidence – there were no photos of the missing heirloom, the three-week-old car before the damage, or the deep-cleaned house before the trip.

Elena's sitter said there weren't any cleaning products left in the house – an absurd claim, she says, but one she was unable to disprove.

Kasia tracked down others who'd used the same sitter. One family in Canberra confirmed they'd also had items stolen, including a few fancy bottles of wine.

She expected the platform to ban them, even though Kasia had arranged the sit with them via Facebook.

Reading over the complaint Kasia made to Trusted Housesitters, you get an idea of the challenge facing its support staff.

Kasia Potoczny: We are not sure of what is missing or stolen but we keep finding things that are not right.

Canberra home owner: The PC that connects to my TV had been rendered almost unusable as well, I had to reinstall just about everything to get it working properly.

Kasia Potoczny: Should you continue to support this dreadful person through your Website etc. you will be neglecting your obligation to provide decent house-sitters to people who are registered with you.

Kasia Potoczny: You will in fact be exposing your clients to the criminal abuse that we suffered. Is this really what you are about?

For the platform's staff, located in the UK and Canada, these messages arrive from half a world away.

The narratives are often one-sided, and at times additional allegations are introduced halfway through the conversation.

While complaints like Kasia's are usually handled (or not) behind closed doors, there are a sea of reviews for potential users to browse on third-party sites and the platform itself.

In between the mountains of positive reviews, there is an underbelly of allegations about hidden cameras, messy houses, misaligned expectations, dog bites, and neglected pets waiting to be discovered.

Reviewer 1: Apartment is very dirty and has mould in the bathroom as well as several bedroom walls … the air conditioning that didn't work, the electrical faults, the rain leaks

Reviewer 2: [The dog] bared his teeth at me, jumped on me and left me with ripped hands and arms in his bids for attention

Reviewer 3: OMG NEVER AGAIN … you tricked me into coming and trapped me for 3 months … All in all I had enough of you your dog and filthy house

Reviewer 4: The sitter denied the claim and made allegations of unauthorised filming inside house which was untrue.

It's an indication of how significantly things can go wrong.

So, why do people – sitters and home owners alike – continue to use these platforms?

In websites we trust

In 2022, Tyge Kummer and two collaborators surveyed 201 people about their use of the two archetypal sharing economy platforms: Airbnb and Uber.

Their resulting study found that, in both cases, trust in the platform was "the key factor" in overcoming the risks perceived by users, both around damage to property and personal safety.

This is a lesson that Trusted Housesitters appears to have taken to heart.

"With Trusted Housesitters, it's in the name," explains Dr Kummer, an associate professor at QUT’s Centre for Future Enterprise.

"[Trust] comes up in every [marketing] video, all the time. It's very deliberate how they use these trust cues."

The platform builds trust in multiple ways, he says, with each aimed at satisfying different kinds of people.

"Some people have more gut feeling and trust just by emotional cues, while others want to see numbers."

Trusted Housesitters – like other sharing economy platforms – builds trust through a combination of marketing materials, testimonials, ratings, photos, user bios and ID verification.

"These websites basically do everything," Dr Kummer says.

While Trusted Housesitters provides plenty of tools for users to build trust with each other, it's ultimately up to the individual to decide to put their possessions, pets and personal safety on the line.

And plenty of people are choosing to do exactly that. After recording 158 per cent growth in global membership during 2022, the company was valued at $150 million.

While it's marketed at travellers, some young Australians are also turning to house-sitting to escape rising rents in their own cities amid a nationwide housing crisis.

Not-so-deep relationships

Calling in from someone else's light-filled kitchen in the UK, Angela Laws seems like living proof of the possibilities of house-sitting platforms.

She is head of public relations at Trusted Housesitters, and has seen it ride a massive wave of sign-ups following the easing of pandemic travel restrictions.

Ms Laws has also regularly taken the plunge herself as a sitter.

She tends to arrive at a stranger's house the night before they leave on holiday – sometimes, they have as little as one hour together – and they quickly build a relationship.

"Not a deep relationship," she clarifies, but enough for them to know they can trust her.

"They will then give me the keys to the most precious things in their life, which is their pets and their homes — and they will walk out the door."

Ms Laws puts this readiness to trust down to the like-mindedness of the Trusted Housesitters community.

The key to building trust, in her opinion, is that the other party's "motivations for what they want to do are true and the same as yours".

As she works for the company – something she is open about with home owners – her experiences may not be representative of every sitter on the platform, though she says staff receive "no preferential treatment".

When things do go wrong, she points to the review system as a way to ensure accountability.

"A negative review makes those members strive harder to actually make the experience a good one," she explains.

"Each side of the network, both pet parents and sitters, have these reviews. And so, it's not like it's one-sided."

Under review

Trusted Housesitters declined to provide figures on the frequency of disputes, saying they were "very rare".

But Angela Laws confirmed there have been serious incidents, including animal welfare concerns.

An ABC analysis of 14,872 house-sits arranged through Trusted Housesitters in Australia found only 55 reviews with three stars or lower.

The reviews that are submitted to the platform are overwhelmingly positive – 99.6 per cent of the ones left by sitters are perfect five-star reviews.

However, Tessa says these numbers might be misleading.

"When I hear horror stories from sitters, most often they just leave the platform," rather than leaving a negative review, she says.

Whatever the cause, this culture of high ratings – one that's hardly unique to Trusted Housesitters – means a single negative review can cause significant challenges in finding future matches.

This is an important function of a review system, as it protects the community from bad eggs – but it also leaves users open to their reputations being tarnished by a single over-zealous reviewer.

Acknowledging this, Trusted Housesitters applies a light touch to moderation.

"[The review system] is not something that we tamper with," Ms Laws says.

"We have a saying that there's two sides to every story, and somewhere in the middle is the truth.

"We do the very best that we can to be non-judgemental, to look at the facts."

The company's policy states that a review "will only be removed by us if it violates member guidelines, the code of conduct, or our Terms and Conditions".

There will always be reviews left in bad faith, though, so the challenge lies in ensuring the necessary interventions are fair – or at least appear to be.

As soon as reviews are deleted or changed, there is a risk of being seen to be taking sides or censoring dissent. When that happens, trust in the system is the first casualty.

Power imbalances

Despite being bitten by a dog and having reason to believe she'd been filmed while swimming naked, Tessa was actually most concerned about the review she received after her stay in the Australian bush.

In the home owner's lukewarm four-star review, they accused Tessa of not treating the dog as well as she could have.

It was her first less-than-perfect review, and she worried it would make it difficult for her to find future house-sits on the platform.

But, despite the poor behaviour of the home owner, Tessa ultimately failed to have the review taken down.

She was, in a way, unsurprised by this. Tessa has long suspected that Trusted Housesitters' support staff tend to take the side of home owners more often than that of sitters.

Dr Kummer agrees that the marketplace dynamics on Trusted Housesitters are similar to that of Airbnb – home owners are more in demand than sitters.

However, home owners Kasia Potoczny and Elena Bryant had the opposite feeling when they had their homes trashed by rogue sitters.

They were both outraged that their sitters escaped without serious repercussions.

After failing to provide evidence of the state of her house or car when she left, Elena was offered a year of free membership on Trusted Housesitters as compensation. Her sitter was also removed from the platform, however she suspects they may have multiple accounts.

"You really think I'm going to use that?" Elena asks bitterly.

"I will never use Trusted Housesitters again in a million years."

Both home owners – Elena and Kasia – swore off the platform after a single negative incident, but Tessa continues using it, even after enduring three bad experiences on it. After all, she points out, the majority of her house-sits have been positive.

The fine print

To deal with the messiness of its position in the middle, Trusted Housesitters' legal policy outlines how the company only provides "an introduction service" to connect sitters and home owners.

Home owners are "solely responsible" for vetting sitters and making decisions in their own best interests.

Ms Laws says "technically we are a platform for connecting people" and "we're not in a position where we're actually putting people in other people's homes as a business".

This means that – despite the platform's name – Trusted Housesitters makes no guarantees about whether users are trustworthy or not.

What happens on a house-sit is governed only by the platform's code of conduct that, among other things, requires indoor security cameras to be disabled, and outdoor ones to be advertised in the listing.

Trusted Housesitters' policies aren't enforceable by the police (unless state or territory laws are broken), so generally the only punishment available is to ban rule-breakers – and even this can't be guaranteed to happen unless the evidence is overwhelming.

For some home owners, the risks of breaking the rules – by secretly using cameras, for example – are probably worth it for peace of mind when their homes and pets are left in the hands of strangers.

With so much at stake, the limited wrath of the platform's support staff may seem like the lesser of two evils.

When asked for details about the support team tasked with dealing with disputes, Ms Laws said it was run "around-the-clock", but declined to say how many employees were assigned to it.

Rather than intervening on Tessa's behalf and taking down the review, Trusted Housesitters' support staff encouraged her to try to resolve her dispute with the home owner directly.

But given the heated disagreements they'd already had, Tessa thought that was unlikely to be fruitful. Her frustration boiled over into anger.

In her final email regarding the case, she accused the home owner of having a vicious personality.

And the response left her fuming.

Trusted Housesitters staff: Although I understand your reasons to be upset with the previous sit and owner, it does not call for any language that can be deemed or considered generally offensive. We do have Member Guidelines, a Code of Conduct, and Terms and Conditions to follow.

In Tessa's mind, the staffer was focusing on the wrong issue.

While they were quick to react to "offensive" language on their site, the support staff had been toothless when it really counted — in real life.