How House-Sitting Became the Ultimate Secret Weapon for Homebuyers Testing New Neighborhoods

When Rebecca Dharmapalan and her partner, Nekhi, began planning their major cross-country relocation from Oakland, California, to Brooklyn, New York, they faced a classic dilemma familiar to many modern home seekers: How do you commit to a new city without making an expensive leap of faith? Eager to truly understand the rhythm, culture, and financial realities of New York’s diverse boroughs before signing a costly lease or purchasing a property, the couple turned to an increasingly popular trend among nomadic movers—house-sitting.

Rather than relying on brief weekend getaways or locking themselves into high-priced short-term rentals, Dharmapalan and her partner utilized a global pet-sitting platform to test-drive their future life across different Brooklyn neighborhoods.

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

At the time, the 30-year-old Californian had previously lived in New York City, but her partner, Nekhi, had only visited once and harbored natural hesitations about uprooting his life on the West Coast. Dharmapalan quickly concluded that the most effective way to win him over and ease his concerns was to live in the Big Apple for an extended period, testing different neighborhoods for size. However, doing so through conventional routes, such as monthly sublets, corporate housing, or hotels, would have easily drained thousands of dollars from their bank accounts each month.

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

To bypass these steep costs, the couple utilized TrustedHousesitters, a global pet-sitting exchange platform operating across 180 countries. The online marketplace connects traveling pet owners with vetted, reliable pet and house sitters. Both homeowners and sitters pay an annual subscription fee ranging from $129 to $259 to access the platform, but crucially, no money changes hands for individual stays. As part of the arrangement, homeowners receive dependable, in-home pet care while traveling, while sitters are rewarded with free lodging for weeks or months at a time.

Mathew Prior, CEO of TrustedHousesitters, highlights the mutual appeal of the model.

"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," Prior says. "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 in Competitive Housing Markets

Deciding where to live in a major metropolitan area carries extraordinarily heavy financial stakes, particularly in New York City. According to Realtor.com quarterly rent reports, the median monthly asking rent in Brooklyn stood at $4,197, marking a nearly 5% increase compared to the previous year.

To comfortably afford a typical rental home in Brooklyn without becoming house-poor, tenants need to earn a gross household income of nearly $12,500 per month, or approximately $167,880 per year. For comparison, the median asking rent in the San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area, where Dharmapalan originally hailed from, hovered at just over $3,000 a month.

Having previously completed smaller house-sitting assignments through the platform during brief getaways in California, Dharmapalan and her partner decided to scale up the strategy. They leveraged house-sitting as an inventive, budget-friendly way to live like authentic locals in different parts of Brooklyn while preparing for their eventual relocation.

Over the course of several months, the couple successfully booked two extended stays. Their first assignment took them to Fort Greene, where they cared for a Chihuahua mix named Slug. Their second stay was in Crown Heights, where their four-legged responsibilities expanded to include two dogs, Ziggy and Venus, alongside 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," Dharmapalan says. "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."

The immersion provided crucial insights that completely altered their perspective. Before arriving in New York, the couple favored Fort Greene, which offered everything they wanted on paper. Yet, living in the community day-to-day and speaking at length with longtime residents quickly revealed that the neighborhood was not the right fit for them.

Crown Heights, by contrast, proved to be an entirely different experience.

"Crown Heights was the opposite," Dharmapalan 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."

Dharmapalan remains convinced that a traditional hotel stay would never have allowed them to integrate into the community so thoroughly.

"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," she explains. "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."

During their pet-sitting stint in Crown Heights, the couple also discovered local gems, such as a Bengali corner cafe that became an essential part of Dharmapalan’s morning routine, offering hot samosas and chai on her walk to the gym. They also learned which local 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," Dharmapalan notes. "That told us far more about what life there would actually cost and feel like than a vacation would."

Beyond helping them select a neighborhood, living inside an authentic residential home clarified their broader property wishlist, ranging from interior details like wallpaper and hardwood floors to vital environmental factors like neighborhood walkability, access to green spaces, and a palpable sense of community.

According to Prior, Dharmapalan’s journey is far from an isolated incident. Thousands of TrustedHousesitters clients are using pet-sitting as an exploratory scouting tool to test local housing markets before committing to long-term leases or property purchases.

"That means you’re less likely to make an expensive mistake," Prior observes.

An Unexpected Pivot and a Growing Industry Trend

Ultimately, the Oakland couple had to alter their plans and pull the plug on their anticipated Brooklyn relocation after Nekhi received a compelling job offer in Pasadena, California, keeping the couple firmly rooted on the West Coast.

Despite the sudden change of plans, Dharmapalan views their Brooklyn house-sitting experiment as an undeniable success.

"It honestly makes me even more glad we tested Brooklyn the way we did," she reflects. "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."

Refusing to abandon the strategy, Dharmapalan and Nekhi are now utilizing the platform to search for their next prospective home base in Los Angeles.

Founded in 2010 in the United Kingdom, TrustedHousesitters has grown exponentially and now boasts roughly 240,000 active members worldwide. Prior notes that the platform experiences high demand primarily among two distinct demographics: Gen Z and young millennials looking to relocate to new cities for career opportunities while eyeing future homeownership, alongside empty nesters seeking a scenic lifestyle change.

The average house-sitting stay on the platform lasts approximately 10 days, though it is increasingly common for adventurous sitters to move between different neighborhoods within the same metropolitan market, frequently gravitating toward lesser-known residential enclaves and suburbs rather than tourist-heavy city centers.

"What you get is a real immersion in a local area," Prior explains. "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."

Data from TrustedHousesitters indicates that Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Denver, and Brooklyn currently stand out as the five busiest house-sitting hubs across the United States. Meanwhile, markets experiencing the fastest growth in booking volume include Santa Monica, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia.

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