Your Starting Points: Where You Stand Before You Agree

It’s a Sunday evening and the sitter has no sit lined up yet. She opens the questions on her phone, mostly out of curiosity, and starts answering.

Keeping in touch is easy: every three days, she knows that from experience. She’s relaxed about food. Then she gets to cameras indoors, and finds she has a much firmer line than she’s ever said out loud. A declared camera by the front door, maybe. Anything in the rooms she sleeps and lives in, no.

Across town, a homeowner is doing the same. He reaches the urgent vet decision and realises he has never once thought about what should happen if the old cat is ill while he’s on a flight.

Neither of them has agreed anything with anyone. They’ve just found out where they stand.

“Flexible”, “happy to discuss”, “we’ll sort it out when we get there”: housesitting runs on vague goodwill. Two people assume they agree because neither has said anything specific enough to disagree with. That works until it doesn’t, and it tends to stop working mid-sit, with animals involved, when neither person can easily walk away.

It’s easy never to have put your view on cameras, the vet or how clean “clean” is into words. It’s much easier to do that alone, with nobody waiting for an answer, than on a video call where you’re both trying to be liked.

A disagreement on screen is information. A disagreement mid-sit is a crisis.

A starting point is your answer to one of the questions, from your own side. The questions are the ones that tend to cause trouble: keeping in touch, cameras indoors, someone drops by, meeting first, getting there, the urgent vet decision and the last morning.

The homeowner and the sitter are asked different questions about the same thing. On keeping in touch, the homeowner is asked, “How often would you still want to hear from them?” The sitter is asked, “How often could you comfortably send an update?”

Each answer says what it protects and what it asks of the other person. If a homeowner chooses every three days, it protects this: “You hear often enough to spot a problem without hovering over the sit.” And it asks this: “There can be a few quiet days between messages.” So you see the cost of your answer as well as the comfort.

These aren’t demands. They’re starting points.

It isn’t a score. Nobody gets a number or a percentage. People don’t reduce to a number, and neither do sits. When you agree with someone, each line simply matches or isn’t matched yet.

It isn’t a check on you. You don’t need to have sat or hosted through any website, or prove anything, to answer.

It isn’t public. Your answers stay with you until you choose to send an agreement to someone.

It isn’t a promise. Nothing binds you until you and the other person both sign.

From your own experience. Think back over sits you’ve done or hosted. What went well, and what would you agree differently next time? That’s usually where your answers are.

From the questions themselves. Reading the questions, and the choices under each, is often enough to show you where you stand.

Know which ones you’d change. Some answers are lines you’d hold whatever the sit. Others are preferences you’d shift for the right home and the right animals. Knowing which is which before you start makes the conversation later much shorter.

Be honest, not strategic. The best starting points are honest ones. Saying “no cameras” when you’d happily accept one by the front door narrows your sits for no reason. Saying you’re relaxed about everything when you care a lot about the last morning sets up exactly the surprise you were trying to avoid.

On Reputable Sitters, every agreement begins with your starting points. You answer the questions one at a time, and as you answer, the agreement writes itself: each answer shows the line it would put in. Settle on a short update each day, for example, and the line reads:

When you’re ready, you send it to the other person by link. They answer from their side, and you both see which lines match. Our guide to meeting in the middle covers what happens next.

Your starting points are a private note to yourself, not an agreement, and they bind nobody. Nothing binds until you both sign, and once you have, the agreement can’t be changed by either of you, or by us. It’s worth knowing, though, that an agreement doesn’t have to be written down to count: a spoken agreement can still count in law. The trouble is proving what was said, and writing it down settles that before it matters.