‘We Used House-Sitting To Plan Our Cross-Country Move—Until Life Got In the Way’

When Rebecca Dharmapalan and her partner began planning their big move from Oakland, CA, to Brooklyn, NY, they wanted to get a real feel for the neighborhoods before committing, so they turned to house-sitting to test-drive their future life.

"A cross-country move is a big financial bet, and I didn’t want us to make it on a hunch," Dharmapalan tells Realtor.com®.

The 30-year-old Californian had lived in New York City before, but her partner, Nekhi, had visited only once and was hesitant to uproot his life on the West Coast.

Dharmapalan concluded that the best way to get Nekhi on board would be to live in the Big Apple for some time, trying different neighborhoods on for size. But doing so through conventional routes, such as sublets and hotels, would have cost the young couple thousands of dollars a month.

"And every dollar spent trying out the city was a dollar we wouldn’t have for the real move," notes Dharmapalan.

Their workaround was TrustedHousesitters—a global pet-sitting platform operating in 180 countries. The online exchange connects pet owners with pet and house sitters.

Both homeowners and sitters pay an annual subscription fee, ranging from $129 to $259, to access the marketplace, but no money changes hands for individual stays. 

As part of the arrangement, homeowners get vetted in-home pet care while traveling, and sitters get free lodging for weeks or months at a time. 

"The homeowner can go away with the peace of mind knowing their pet's been looked after by a sitter who's doing it for love rather than money, 
and the sitter can enjoy a unique homestay and the companionship of pets," TrustedHousesitters CEO Mathew Prior tells Realtor.com.

"That's probably what makes it such an attractive opportunity for people who are looking to relocate. And indeed, a lot of our sitters, anecdotally we hear, are actually using the platform for that."

High financial stakes

Deciding where to live in New York City carries heavy financial stakes. As of September, the median monthly asking rent in the borough stood at $4,197, up nearly 5% from a year ago, according to the latest Realtor.com quarterly rent report.

To afford the typical rental home without becoming house-poor, tenants in Brooklyn would need to earn a gross household income of nearly $12,500 per month, or $167,880 per year. 

For comparison, the median asking rent in the San Francisco-Oakland area, where Dharmapalan is from, was just over $3,000 a month in September. 

Dharmapalan and her partner had done sits through TrustedHousesitters in the past during brief getaways in California, and now they decided to use house-sitting as a budget-friendly way to live like locals in different parts of Brooklyn in preparation for a relocation.

Over the course of several months, Dharmapalan and her partner booked two extended sits. The first was in Fort Greene, where they looked after a Chihuahua mix named Slug. The second was in Crown Heights, where their four-legged charges included two dogs, Ziggy and Venus, and two cats, Moon and Cosmo.

"House-sitting let us really sink into a neighborhood for weeks. Then, we were able to move on without a major financial hit," says Dharmapalan. "Our total travel cost was less than half of what a single month of accommodations would have run. We came out of it with our savings intact and had decided on the Crown Heights neighborhood."

Before arriving, the couple favored Fort Greene, which had everything they wanted on paper. But living in the community and speaking to longtime residents made them realize that it was not the right place for them.

"Crown Heights was the opposite," she says. "From the moment we arrived, it felt right, and we decided that’s where we wanted to live. It reminded us of the cultural richness and diversity we love in Oakland.

"Every afternoon we walked Venus and Ziggy to Brower Park and watched Shoot Hoops Not Guns, a youth basketball and violence prevention organization, running games while the whole neighborhood hummed around us, which is something you don’t get from a listing or a weekend visit."

The 30-year-old is convinced that if she and her partner came to town for a hotel stay, they could not have gotten to know the two neighborhoods as well as they did through house-sitting.

"With a hotel, you are just a visitor. With a sit, you have a set of keys, a real neighborhood, and a pet who needs walking at least twice a day," says Dharmapalan. "Those walks turned into real conversations with longtime residents.

"In Fort Greene, neighbors told us how much the area had changed with gentrification. That generational perspective was one of the most valuable parts of the experience, and we only got it because we were there long enough, and walking a local dog, to earn those conversations."

While pet-sitting in Crown Heights, the couple found a Bengali corner cafe that became part of Dharmapalan's morning routine, with hot samosas and chai on the way to the gym, and they learned which bodega made the best breakfast sandwiches.

"We lived on a normal budget, too, including groceries, eating out locally once or twice a week, and public transit," says Dharmapalan. "That told us far more about what life there would actually cost and feel like than a vacation would."

Beyond picking a neighborhood, living inside someone's home clarified the couple's property wishlist, from carefully chosen wallpaper to hardwood floors, walkability, access to green spaces, and a sense of community.

According to Prior, Dharmapalan's experience is representative of how thousands of TrustedHousesitters clients anecdotally are using pet-sitting to test housing markets before deciding where to rent or buy.

"That means you're less likely to make an expensive mistake," says the company CEO.

An unexpected pivot

Ultimately, the Oakland couple had to pull the plug on their planned Brooklyn relocation after Dharmapalan's partner got a job offer in Pasadena, CA, keeping them on the West Coast.

However, Dharmapalan views their Brooklyn house-sitting experiment as an undeniable win for them.

"It honestly makes me even more glad we tested Brooklyn the way we did," she says. "We could’ve spent thousands on sublets or hotels, or rushed into a lease or a purchase and lost that money. Because we house-sat, we got a real feel for life in Fort Greene and Crown Heights without ruining our savings."

Dharmapalan and Nekhi are now using TrustedHousesitters to look for their next home in Los Angeles.

A real estate scouting tool

Founded in 2010 in the U.K., TrustedHousesitters now boasts 240,000 members worldwide. Prior, the CEO, says that the platform is in high demand among two distinct demographics: Gen Z and young millennials looking to relocate to a new city for work and potentially hoping to purchase their first house, along with empty nesters eyeing a change of scenery.

The average house-sitting stay lasts 10 days, and it's common for sitters to move between different neighborhoods within the same market, often gravitating toward lesser-known corners and suburbs.

"What you get is a real immersion in a local area," says Prior. "You're staying in a house, it's occupied, and with the community around you. So you're not just seeing the center of the city, the glamorous bits, you're seeing the real city."

Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, OR, Denver, and Brooklyn currently stand out as the five busiest house-sitting hubs in the U.S., according to TrustedHousesitters' data.

Meanwhile, markets seeing the fastest growth in bookings include Santa Monica, CA, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia.

"For people who are looking at a new area, you can't go for two nights and expect to understand it," contends Prior. "
You have to spend some time."