Sitters who move into your home and stay with your dog while you are away, keeping the animal in its own kitchen and on its own walking routes, are the central idea behind The Home Service Ltd, trading online as housesitters.co.uk. This is a live-in house and pet sitting agency, working across the UK since 1997. The visiting model drops in twice a day, but the sitter here lives on site for the duration, which is a meaningfully different proposition from the visiting model most pet owners first picture.
Live-in pet and house sitting
The pet sitting side of The Home Service Ltd is built around that continuity. Sitters handle companionship, daily walks, feeding and any care plan the owner sets out, all in the home the animal already knows. For nervous pets, elderly animals, or households with several to look after at once, staying in familiar surroundings rather than a kennel is the whole point. The same person covers the house sitting work too, acting as a live-in guardian who keeps the property occupied, secure and ticking over while the owners are gone. An occupied house is harder to burgle than an empty one, and that simple fact is most of the pitch. The agency has been pairing sitters with homes long enough, since 1997, to have a working sense of what tends to go wrong and how to head it off.
Vacant property and plant care
Beyond the two headline services, the company runs a probate and security sitting line aimed at vacant properties, including homes caught up in probate or an estate changing hands. That is a narrower and more specialist need, and it is sensible to see The Home Service Ltd call it out separately instead of folding it vaguely into general house sitting. There is also a dedicated plant care section, which on its own sounds minor but tends to be exactly the thing people forget when they hand over a set of keys. A sitter already on site to walk the dog watering the plants is the sort of overlap that makes the live-in model pay off.
Sitter vetting safeguards
What gives The Home Service Ltd more weight than a typical sitter-matching site is how it handles its people. Sitters are employed directly by the company, not freelancers picked off a marketplace. Each one is interviewed in their own home before being taken on, and the work is backed by ten million pounds of public liability insurance. The company also lists membership of the Federation of Small Businesses. None of these points is flashy, but together they answer the obvious worry, which is that you are letting a stranger live in your house and mind something you care about. An employed, home-vetted sitter under a company insurance policy is a different risk picture from an unvetted individual you found yourself.
Recruiting sitters across the UK
Coverage is nationwide, with the site pointing to named landing pages for York, Chester, Southampton, Cambridge, Gloucester and Oxford. That spread of specific locations reads as a real operating footprint rather than a generic claim to cover everywhere. The site also recruits, inviting people to join the network as live-in guardians, which fits an agency that needs a steady supply of trustworthy sitters to keep that nationwide promise honest.
How to contact the company
Contact details for The Home Service Ltd are easy to find and complete, which counts for a service that asks for this much trust. There is a phone number, an email address, and a full postal address for the office in Orford, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, plus a clear enquiry route. A house sitting agency that publishes a real street address and a landline is telling prospective customers it expects to be reachable and held to account, and that is the right approach for this kind of work.
Reputation without independent reviews
On third-party reputation, the picture is less straightforward. The testimonials shown on the site are the company's own, and a search did not turn up an independent profile for The Home Service Ltd on the usual review platforms. There is a wrinkle worth naming: a separately named competitor with a similar trading style does appear on Trustpilot and Feefo, so it would be easy for a prospective customer to read that competitor's ratings and assume they belong here. They do not. For this specific entity, verifiable third-party feedback is simply absent, and that is a fair thing to weigh before booking.
Verdict on The Home Service Ltd
The honest read is mixed but leans positive. The Home Service Ltd offers a clearly structured set of services, a credible vetting and insurance setup, an operating history going back to 1997, and contact transparency that many smaller agencies skip. A reader who lands on this listing and wants a live-in arrangement for pets or property will find a serious operator here. The one real gap is external verification: the absence of independent reviews means a first-time customer is trusting the company's own account of itself, which sounds credible but leaves something unconfirmed that more established platforms would have filled in.
