House-sitting: The cozzie-livs life hack saving some $40,000-plus a year

Steph Costa and Scott Griffiths invite my wife and me over for Sunday lunch at their place in south-east Sydney’s Little Bay. We whistle enviously as we’re welcomed inside. It’s a stunning two-storey house with solid oak floors, a wrap-around stone kitchen island and an open-plan dining area that flows through to a perfectly manicured backyard and swimming pool. As our two-year-old daughter rolls around on the grass with Barley, a good-natured golden labrador, I ask Costa, an affable marketing professional from Brazil who works alongside my wife at a social media company and is striking and statuesque enough to be a model, how long they’ve had this place. “Oh no, it’s not ours,” she smiles. “We’re just house-sitting.”

The miniature palace we’re in actually belongs to a Scottish family, who are back in the home country for a wedding. Barley is theirs, too, and that’s why Costa and Griffiths are here – saving the owners a motza on kennelling fees and giving them peace of mind that their pooch is in good hands, all while living in their house as if it were theirs. This in itself wouldn’t be so unusual if the young couple were simply minding a nice house for a few weeks before heading back to their own. But Costa and Griffiths, a Kiwi transplant who works as a software engineer, don’t have a permanent address. Their collected worldly possessions are stuffed into a small storage unit. Barley is but one of dozens of dogs they’ve temporarily adopted. They have been house-sitting non-stop for almost two years.

Looking after someone’s place while they’re away is hardly a new phenomenon. But house-sitting, once the province of kindly neighbours or adventurous retirees, has exploded in popularity in Australia over the past five years. This tracks the country’s dual rental and housing crises, with a recent Domain report putting the national vacancy rate at 0.7 per cent – a record low. House-sitting is formally serviced by a number of online platforms, on which sitters pay a small membership fee to build profiles that enable homeowners to find them, attracting reviews from those whose places and pups (or cats, birds, mice, hamsters and for some farm stays, livestock) they “sit”. And it’s not just hobbyists looking for a sea change during the holidays, either. Many house-sitters now do it full-time, moving from suburb to suburb every few weeks or months, while saving serious money on rent and bills.

Costa and Griffiths are one such example. Since meeting at a bar in Sydney’s Pyrmont during the first easing of COVID restrictions in mid-2020, they’ve spent most of their time together living unconventionally. Their first holiday was “a campervan tour from Perth to Broome and back, over the course of three weeks, working at the same time”, says Griffiths, a mild-mannered giant of a man with a magnificent salt-and-pepper beard, who explains that this arrangement answered some of their questions about their nomadic future. “‘Do we drive on the weekends? Do we drive in the evenings? How do we work with mobile-coverage maps, get multiple types of SIM cards, booster aerials?’ All that jazz.” Like many who found themselves fully remote in the drollness of lockdown, the new couple decided to bounce between more porous borders like Queensland’s, for the remainder of the year.

“By the end of 2021, Scott mentioned [the idea] of house-sitting, but I’d never heard of it,” Costa laughs. “I’m from Brazil, we’d never trust anybody with our place like this: ‘This is insane.’ ” She was soon won over by the lifestyle (“a very natural thing”), gave up the lease on her flat and packed her remaining stuff into storage. The pair’s most out-there house-sit was also their first; a two-month stint on a farm in Wootton on NSW’s mid north coast. “It was a seven-acre block, 30 minutes inland from Forster, kind of in the middle of nowhere,” Griffiths laughs. “It had two dogs, two alpacas and a worm farm. There were cows.” Costa says that, as is customary with every house-sit, they went and saw the property first and met the owners. “We were like, ‘OK, we can live here. It’s a really good place. We can handle the alpacas.’ ”

Since then, Costa estimates they’ve minded at least 20 houses, with a few repeats, including the current Little Bay property and a Paddington terrace. The pair tends to look for listings that are for at least a month and that fit around Costa’s work in Sydney’s CBD. “We had three [homeowners] from the previous year who wanted to rebook us, and we were like, ‘OK, maybe we’ll do this for another year,’ ” she says. “And with the cost of living, you get used to not paying rent, which is a good thing, too. You know, at the end of a year, we’d saved all this money.”

Griffiths has calculated that on rent alone (as part of the deal, sitters aren’t expected to cover bills like water, electricity, internet, council fees or insurance), he and Costa “tend to save around $40,000 to $50,000 a year”.

This year marks the 20th year of operation for Aussie House Sitters (AHS), one of the oldest and largest online house-sitting directories in Australia. Founder Nick Fuad says the service now facilitates more than 50,000 house-sits annually around the country, including those of Costa and Griffiths. Fuad has the laidback air of someone who’s lived a rambling, alternative existence for much of his life; a yin-yang surf T-shirt, big grin and fading soul-patch goatee. A naturally adventurous type, he’s lived all over the country with his wife and two children. He came up with the idea for AHS while living in remote Northern Territory communities, trying to find a house swap for his family in Alice Springs, and it’s grown organically since, most notably after 2020.

“I think the main thing driving [this trend] is just the flexibility of work,” he says. “COVID obviously helped that as well. People can work from home and get just as much done – and they also can’t afford to get into the buyers’ market. It’s definitely the perfect storm.”

He says while the service flatlined during the pandemic, listings quickly returned to normal in 2021 “and have gone up by nearly 150 per cent” over the following two years. The number of registered sitters on the site has nearly doubled over the same time period. Many of these newer entrants are young professionals, like Costa and Griffiths. But the ones who’ve been doing it the longest? “That’d be the grey nomads,” he laughs.

“House-sitting is a whole situation. It’s a peripatetic lifestyle that requires a certain fortitude and also the capacity to arrive and depart and not get too emotionally attached to anywhere.” High up in a top-floor apartment in the leafy inner-west Sydney suburb of Dulwich Hill, Belinda Dickinson won’t tell me her exact age, but whatever it is, she maintains the energy and good humour of someone many decades younger. She wears a bright floral dress; her silver hair is cropped short, framing her green eyes and funky mauve specs. There’s a cat here that she’s allegedly minding, but I’m yet to see it. Perhaps it’s been enticed by the lorikeets in the tall trees outside.

‘A lot of the population believe that their emotional security is in their possessions … Of course, it’s not.’

Belinda Dickinson

Dickinson is quite deliberate about the places she chooses: “I’ve always got a reason and this is about being cool [in summer] and having an air-conditioner.” A veteran sitter who’s been at it for nearly a decade, Dickinson has done it all, from minding a Mosman mansion for a high-flying businessman (where she once locked herself out while walking the dog and had to get back in through the cat flap) to a 15th-century, thatched-roof house in Dorset, England (where one door was so heavy, “I dislocated my shoulder pretty much every time I tried to get out to the garden”), and everywhere in between. But for the most part, she house-sits to save on rent and bills, which she uses to fund her return to her beloved Italy each high season. “And here’s the million-dollar thing,” she says, “it’s actually cheaper for me to go to Italy and rent or sublet in Naples or Florence than it is to spend a week here in Sydney.”

She’s always prioritised travel, and having neither married nor had children, has been able to live as she chooses. “I was a flight attendant on and off for 30 years and lived a fairly maverick lifestyle. This is really just another chapter of that lifestyle.”

Dickinson, who also works as a psychic medium, moves two small agates between her palms ritualistically as she speaks. Like Costa and Griffiths, she doesn’t have a fixed address. “It would be lovely to have a home of my own, but I made a commitment to myself quite a few years ago that my life experience was going to be as exciting as it could be,” she says. “I have a great respect for being alive, and for having the fortune to be in a country where I can manifest what I want. A lot of the population believe that their emotional security is in their possessions and of course, it’s not.”

Dickinson is not the only person I meet who prioritises experience over ownership. In Belmont, a residential suburb south of Geelong in Victoria, Monique Sgro and her partner David Bartlett have been house-sitting since 2018. Sgro and Bartlett are in their early 30s and both work remotely for the same private health insurer. “Our friends are sort of getting to the point in their lives where they are settling down, buying houses, having kids and that sort of thing,” Sgro says. “And everyone says to me, ‘I wish we had done [what you do] when we had the opportunity.’ ”

Much like the other sitters I’ve encountered, Sgro sees house-sitting as a chance not only to sample other worlds, but to save enough money to sample the rest of the world. It’s clearly working; Sgro and Bartlett have managed to take close to two years off to travel since getting together, which she believes wouldn’t have been possible if they were paying rent or a mortgage. “Our expenses are very low,” she says. “We don’t have any car loans, we pay, like, 20 bucks a month each for our phones. No credit cards, we don’t pay any bills. So no water, electricity, Wi-Fi, anything like that.”

Sgro once had an owner ask if she could set up nanny-cams across the house for the five weeks she was away to watch over her kittens.

Conveniently, their parents all live in Geelong, which means if something falls through or house-sits don’t line up, they have somewhere to stay for a few days. “Because we work from home now, we have a lot of computer stuff that we take with us, so we tend not to really accept anything under three to four weeks if we can,” Sgro says. “And if that means we go home for a week or two to wait for the next, longer one to start, then we just do that.” Costa and Griffiths tend to use serviced apartments for this purpose. “Things usually never fall through,” Costa says. “It’s more like you naturally have gaps, and instead of finding [another] place to house-sit for two or three days, we just prefer to go to a Meriton.”

Sgro and Bartlett don’t just choose to house-sit properties in their local area; they also pick ones where they can have a holiday. During Christmas 2022, they spent five weeks taking care of a harbourside apartment in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay. “We’re now in Newcastle on a three-month sit,” Sgro says. “For these interstate ones, both homeowners approached us after seeing our
profile and asked if we would be interested. We’ve got another good one in the middle of the year to escape the Victorian winter.”

Some would argue that, while this is all well and good when living in the now, buying a property is in some ways insurance against potential future insecurity. While neither couple expressed concerns around not having their own home, both acknowledged it may figure in their plans down the line. The pressure on this front comes primarily from their parents. “I mean, my dad wants me to buy a house,” Sgro says, “but he also doesn’t mind me travelling and that’s not going to stop. We’ve looked into buying an investment property or a small [place] that we might come back to, but we’re pretty happy to still do it [house-sit] if it makes sense.”

Costa and Griffiths, meanwhile, have used their various house-sits to scope out where they might eventually want to buy, with Costa favouring the upper north shore Sydney suburb of Turramurra. “The location was really convenient. You can get a train and be in the city very fast,” she says. Like Sgro, Griffiths can imagine buying property that they don’t necessarily turn into their home. “Maybe we buy something that has a double utility, where we don’t have to stay in it all the time,” he muses. “Then we get the flexibility of going and house-sitting anywhere; stay in Broome, stay in Perth, go to Queensland, which we haven’t really done because we’ve generally been focused around Sydney.”

‘It takes a whole afternoon (to unpack) and you’re like, “I’ve got to go to work on Monday.” So it takes a toll.’

Steph Costa

Back in Sydney’s inner west, Dickinson tells me she’s approaching the age at which many single women in her position find themselves eligible for retirement villages, which in some parts of Sydney and Melbourne can cost up to $1 million just to get into. Increasingly, others wind up on the street. “There’s just this total apathy, particularly with the state government. They kind of go, ‘Oh yes, over-55-year-old women, they’re the highest risk of homelessness.’ Well, I fall into that category. But are they doing anything about it?”

I ask Dickinson if she might ever slow down her globetrotting and consider getting her own place. “I don’t care if somebody [else] owns this,” she says proudly, waving her hand around the room. “I don’t have a thing about ownership. I’ve lived in Europe … People didn’t own their homes. They don’t own them in Germany [where the ownership rate is just under 50 per cent]. This country needs to catch up with community housing. It really does. It’s so far behind.”

When I talk with Costa and Griffiths again a few weeks later, they’re house-sitting yet another place, though owing to the owner’s recent break-up, the French bulldog from the displayed photos is nowhere to be seen. This time it’s a double-brick villa in northern Sydney’s quiet Lane Cove, where they’ll be for a few months. It’s clear the usual inhabitant has an obsession with games. The office shelves overflow with strategic board games like Catan, while the main bookcase is stuffed full of rulebooks for the eternally popular Dungeons and Dragons. “Oh yeah, that’s the thing,” Costa laughs. “Sometimes there’s not much room for your own stuff.”

Costa’s life has changed considerably since she and Griffiths started house-sitting. Last year, her office mandated a three-days-a-week return to work, which meant no more hanging out in the country with the alpacas. Weekends also now come at a premium. “It takes, like, a whole afternoon [to unpack] and you’re like, ‘I’ve got to go to work on Monday.’ So it takes a toll.” On top of this, she and Griffiths are expecting their first baby together in a few weeks.

I put to Costa that this will be quite a seismic change. How will it affect their itinerant approach? She says there will be the inevitable issues around pets – “it depends whether the owners want us to be around their pets with the baby, or their pets around a baby!” – and finding places that might have the requisite gear like changing tables or baths. But she and Griffiths seem unfazed at the possibility of raising a child in multiple environments, or in campervans driving around Australia like they did when they first met.

“Planning a lifestyle where you have this ability to be more flexible is something that’s part of our narrative now,” Griffiths says. “When we’re thinking ahead, that’s going to be, you know, not that we have to do it, but at least have the opportunity in the future to have flexibility to do it.” Both say the biggest dampener on their future house-sitting plans isn’t a newborn, but traditional ways of working. “I have to go to the office,” says Costa, “there’s no easy way around that.”

As a young father myself, I’m slightly dubious as to how this could all turn out. Even when my wife and I holiday domestically, the first thing we look for is a house with as many of the necessary baby accoutrements as possible, stuff like cribs, baths, toys and high chairs. They’re the kind of bulky things you can’t easily bundle into a car that’s already laden with other
possessions. Another thing I’ve learnt is that kids don’t really abide by your rules. As their child grows up, it’ll be interesting to see whether Griffiths and Costa are forced to adapt their strategy. A little physical stability might be something their offspring ends up demanding from them. Then again, maybe that’s my Australian social conditioning talking.

In any case, house-sitting is not all fancy mansions and delightful pets. All the sitters I speak to have had their share of less-than-ideal experiences. “We get places that don’t have curtains,” says Griffiths. “We get places that have double beds – for us! [Both are more than 1.8 metres tall.] The struggle was real.”

In Geelong, Sgro has also had some misfires. “We’ve had a husky that honestly never stopped barking, no matter whether we had it inside or outside or were trying to play with it,” she says. “The homeowners said to lock it inside during the day, and at this point we were still working from an office, so this poor dog had no choice but to go to the bathroom in the house.” Dickinson shoots straight about the phenomenon of pets’ post-pandemic separation anxiety. “What happened during COVID was that everybody got a dog or a cat and most of the dogs were some sort of configuration of oodles, and most of those oodles were brought up to believe they were humans.”

House-sitters can choose their preferred pets to look after, though cats can often be a sticking point. Costa found her limit during a house-sit in northern Sydney’s Pymble. “It was two dogs and five cats, and that was when we learnt what our limit of cats was. We were like, ‘Never again’ – especially the young ones.”

What does Dickinson think of felines? “I’ve had to learn to like them,” she says diplomatically. Speaking of cats, Sgro once had an owner ask if she could set up nanny-cams across the house for the five weeks she was away to watch over her kittens. Sgro politely declined.

“You gotta be open to different personalities. There was one woman, she said she was a sex therapist and I kind of thought, ‘Oh, I don’t think I could cope with the idea of what might be happening in the bedroom.’ She seemed very nice and personable but I think [my partner and I] both thought that was a bit too much …” Annie Callan* is a retired public service worker who lives with her partner, Lynette, in a three-bedroom, two-storey classic terrace, a few streets back from the buzzy epicentre of inner Sydney’s Newtown. It’s a beautiful, quiet spot with a long, leafy garden and a sun-splattered back deck, so it isn’t hard to see why, when Callan lists her place on house-sitting sites – as she has for more than a decade – the applications come in droves. “We tend to go away for five or six weeks at a time,” she says, “mostly to Europe.” She gestures to her docile black dog. “Zoe is getting old. She’s 14-and-a-half. And we have a cat who’s 19-and-a-half, so they’re two elderly little creatures now.“

Callan says her main motivation is never having to kennel her animals, which she says is “hugely expensive, so [having house-sitters] probably saves us thousands of dollars”. She also tends to look for sitters who spend most of their time around the house. “You don’t want to chain them to the place, but you don’t want them to be out all day. Animals just aren’t used to people going out at 7.30am and coming back at six o’clock at night. The dog would be howling; she would be very unhappy.”

In addition to having someone look after her pets, Callan tries to use her position as a homeowner to help those less fortunate. “We’ve often favoured older women because we’re very aware that there’s a real homelessness crisis happening, with older women in particular,” she says. “So if they look like they are in that situation, but seem competent and reliable, we have a little bit of a prejudicial bias to help out.”

Callan says while she’s never had any particularly bad experiences, “we’ve had people with varying degrees of house cleanliness, in the sense that some of them have been grots and some of them have been almost hotel-level clean. So it’s always unpredictable.”

Perhaps Callan is being polite, or has just been lucky. With so many strangers staying unattended at so many homes around the country – vetted or not – the potential for disaster is real. In Dulwich Hill, Dickinson mentions she’s onto her third exploded washing machine, but that’s about as bad as it gets from everyone I meet for this story. Nobody hits me with the juicy stuff, like inadvertently backing over a cat in the driveway, toilets that won’t flush – or on the host side, sitters who throw wild, three-day bacchanals and finish off all the fancy plonk. Perhaps Fuad’s community really is self-regulating, with bad actors on either side voted off the island after a single transgression. After all, scathing one-star reviews have been known to bring restaurants and Uber drivers down. Why not house-sitters?

House-sitting means never having your own registered address. It means dealing with the idiosyncrasies and personal preferences of each owner’s property as you find it, from undersized beds to detonating whitegoods, and scaling down your possessions to those essentials that can reasonably fit in one or two cars. “That’s the thing that I think we miss the most – just having your own space,” says Costa. House-sitting means long days unpacking and repacking. It means keeping someone’s pets happy, but it can also mean extra chores. In Wootton, Griffiths mowed hectares of lawn. Sgro’s current house “has a pool to be maintained and a garden and vegie patch”. It also means the risk of your accommodation being cancelled at a moment’s notice, as has happened to both Sgro and Dickinson. “Look, you have to be prepared that it can all go pear-shaped in any moment,” Dickinson says philosophically. “Of course that works both ways, you know, so there’s a certain amount of faith. There’s a lot of goodwill involved and there’s a lot of integrity.”

Fuad says maintaining perspective is key. “I mean, you can look at it as a challenge, or you can look at it as an exciting adventure – looking after someone’s pets and going to their home, getting to know their neighbours and their local area,” he says. “You’ve got to have a positive attitude to life. I think that helps with house-sitting.” Despite running a medium-sized business that has won multiple awards in its category, Fuad still talks about his member base as a community, something echoed by the sitters I meet. Many have become friendly with the owners of the houses they’ve sat in, and know other house-sitters on the circuit.

While ultimately their motivations range from financial to epicurean, there’s one thing all of the sitters I speak to have in common: a desire to keep at it for as long as possible. “We wanted the ability to stay in parts of Sydney that we hadn’t, in places that we’d probably never afford. With some of these ridiculous house prices, I don’t know if the opportunity would have ever come up,” says Griffiths. “So [now] we get to live that life.” In Geelong, Sgro holds a similar view. “Because we can work from anywhere in Australia, that opens up all sorts of opportunities.” As for Dickinson, it comes down to mindset. “I think we should all share a little bit,” she says. “And if we’re going to live longer, we need to learn to get along with each other better.”

* This name has been changed for privacy.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.