Sitting Pretty : They Keep Your House in Order by Making Themselves at Home

Sunny and Soot Gardner live in the lap of gentle and loving affluence.

They reside in one of the better neighborhoods in Orange County in a rambling two-story, four-bedroom Santa Ana house with an immaculately clipped lawn and gleaming swimming pool.

They share the premises with J.D. and Loretta Gardner, who cater to Sunny’s and Soot’s every little want, from delectable vittles and romps throughout the house to naps atop the cushioned chairs.

But twice a year, when J.D. and Loretta go on trips back East or up North that last weeks at a time, they have to leave Sunny, 4, and Soot, 3, behind.

“It breaks our hearts, but no way are we about to dump them in a kennel,” says Loretta Gardner, 58, a former UCI Medical Center surgical nurse, whose husband, also 58, is a retired computer designer.

And that is where Mary Betancourt comes to the rescue.

Betancourt, you see, is a professional “house-sitter,” and the companionship of Sunny, a bouncy golden retriever, and Soot, a mellow charcoal-colored cat, is one of the pleasures of her round-the-clock occupancy.

Oh, to be sure, she sees to it that the plants are watered, the grass is sprinkled, the mail is collected and the house is made secure.

But Mary knows the chief concern of this household is the pampering of its resident pets.

“They (Gardners) tell me my job is to treat them like little princesses. Well, that’s easy,” she says, sitting in the Gardners’ kitchen, looking at Sunny and Soot with affection. “I just love spoiling them rotten!”

Mary Betancourt, 74 and a widow, belongs to a little-known but fast-growing kind of American entrepreneurship--the business of house-sitting.

Normally, Mary lives in a comfortable but modest mobile home in Garden Grove. But four months out of the year, she works as a “live-in” sitter in some of the swankiest homes in Orange County, from oceanside locales in Dana Point and Huntington Beach to inland hilltops in Irvine and Anaheim.

Her clients are all affluent homeowners--mostly of the “yuppie class,” she says--all willing and able to pay the going rates, around $30 a day for basic live-in services. Most clients are gone on vacations or business trips one to two weeks. Others, like the Gardners, go four to five weeks.

What’s more, Betancourt isn’t a free-lancer. She is one of 65 professional sitters with Home Sitting Services of Orange County, one of hundreds of similar agencies to emerge nationwide in recent years, including an estimated 30 firms in Southern California.

There is no mystery behind the accelerating demand for house-sitters. It is tied to mounting crime rates and to the knowledge that affluent neighborhoods are choice targets for burglaries.

“It’s the whole issue of home security and the genuine fears that go with it,” explains Joan Sullivan, whose Costa Mesa-based Homewatch is one of six house-sitting agencies currently listed in Orange County.

“Homeowners want peace of mind. They want the newspapers picked up, the garbage put out, the pets walked, the prize artifacts guarded--the whole works,” adds Sullivan, who oversees six sitters. “They don’t want to go away and be worried to death about possible break-ins.”

The more familiar form of house-sitting has long been the strictly casual family-to-family or friend-to-friend arrangements. But many homeowners don’t have relatives or friends who can sit for them.

Furthermore, there are the horror stories about still other kinds of sitters hired the old, informal way. Such tales have depicted live-in sitters who left houses unattended for hours, held wild parties or inflicted serious property damage.

Thus, in recent years, as the fears of burglaries and related residential crimes rose, so, too, agency operators claim, did the demand for “professionalizing” house sitting.

These house-sitting firms proclaim “full protection” for clients, be it a weekend jaunt to Las Vegas or a monthlong safari in East Africa. They offer services from “drop-in” visits (generally $8 to $18 a day in Orange County) to round-the-clock occupancy (up to $60 a day if it involves children).

And their sitters are touted as a select bunch--all bonded and insured “professionals.”

Which brings us back to Mary Betancourt: Senior citizens are now the most sought-after house-sitters.

“It makes good business sense,” says Joanne Wojahn, operator of Home Sitting Services of Orange County, which uses only senior citizens, ranging in ages from 55 to the mid-70s. Others in the 60-agency, nationwide Home Sitting Services network, including those in San Diego, West Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley, do the same.

“You have this untapped labor pool going to waste,” she says. “These are people who are the most experienced and temperamentally suited for this line of work.”

For example, there are Stanley and Evelyn Conklin, a retired couple from San Dimas. But at first, the Conklins knew nothing of house-sitting firms.

“Hardly anyone knew businesses like that even existed,” says Stanley, 63, a bank operations manager in Tacoma, Wash., before he and Evelyn moved back to Southern California to retire.

That changed three years ago, when the Conklins saw a local television news report about the Home Sitting Services network. Just weeks later, they contacted Wojahn, who had opened an office in Orange County.

The Conklins were the kind of sitters Wojahn wanted. They had raised three children of their own and have eight grandchildren. They not only had solid business backgrounds--the Conklins once ran a restaurant--but had traveled widely, including to Tahiti and Hawaii.

The clincher: The Conklins were willing and able to take on house sits with small children, an extra service that is a specialty of the La Habra-based firm.

Today the Conklins are among the most popular sitters on Wojahn’s roster. Last year was typical. Working about five months, they chalked up 18 sittings from San Juan Capistrano and Lake Forest in Orange County to Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County--all repeat business.

“We’re trying to cut down the pace a little this year,” says Stanley. “But I’m not so sure. We’re already booked up to next May.”

Their biggest customer, John and Carla Ray of Mission Viejo, have already booked the Conklins seven times--whenever the Rays take short vacations without their sons, Brandon, 9, and J.T., 3.

“We had gone the usual route and tried younger sitters. But it didn’t quite click for us,” says John, 41, representative for a food brokerage in Los Angeles County. “They (Conklins) are jewels. I mean, what can I say? They’re a lot like family.”

The Rays recently moved to an even larger four-bedroom home in Mission Viejo, complete with sweeping view of a golf course. They also now house two dogs, Chopper and Bo, and a cat, Scarlett.

The ground rules are these: The Conklins make $30 a day, or one-half of the agency’s $60 service fee. They can leave the house for only two hours a day, and then only in the daytime. The Rays leave enough food for regular meals, plus extra spending money, and an emergency telephone list that includes the local doctor, veterinarian and plumber.

Chores are kept relatively light. “The kids and pets are closely watched and fed,” says Wojahn. “But there are no heavy duties, no mowing lawns, no major cleaning. We’re not a maid or gardening service. We’re not nurses.”

Still, the Conklins always provide an extra personal touch or two. “You can’t help it. We really love children, and it seems so natural. They (Ray boys) seem like grandkids to us,” says 62-year-old Evelyn.

So the Conklins take Brandon and J.T. Ray to the movies, parks and pizza parlors, as well as the local Mission Viejo recreation complex. And each night, they read them bedtime stories.

Some sitters, like the Conklins, insist that sittings are just that way--folksy, fairly routine stuff.

Usually, they say, nothing more exciting happens than lost keys, dripping pipes, straying pets and children with the sniffles.

Even so, other sitters, projecting a less mundane image, do recount a small disaster here and there.

One overzealous sitter in San Diego used a highly caustic cleanser to scrub the bathtub faucets, sending $500 worth of gold plating down the drain.

When Mary Betancourt was awakened by nudges from the Gardners’ pet dog Sunny, she found a water-softener tank line had burst and was about to flood that part of the house.

Another Orange County sitter, hearing “chomp chomp” noises coming from the living room, discovered the client’s two dogs were chewing up the sofa and reducing it to shreds.

Some of the experiences with pets are bizarre. For instance, the hummingbird collector who left graphic instructions on what to do if one of the birds died.

“He told us to wrap the carcass up nicely and put it in the kitchen freezer,” remembers Helen Howard, office manager for Home Sitting Services of Orange County. Why? “Well, he wanted to dissect the little fellow when he got back.”

A 3-foot alligator was a bigger problem. “The owner assured us it stayed in a glass case in its very own room,” says Howard. “And not to worry, because a neighborhood boy would come in and feed the creature.”

But the owner forgot to mention the alligator to Howard until the day the sitter took over. The sitter “stuck it out like a true trouper,” says Howard, “but she wasn’t crazy about the idea. She was on pins and needles the whole stay.”

One widespread image of the house-sitting field raises the hackles of most sitters. This is one involving a certain skepticism about the job--that house sitting is somewhat boring and lacks societal importance.

“Sure, I’ve heard that kind of talk hundreds of times, and I can understand why,” says Mary Betancourt, an agency sitter for two years. “Not everyone can do it or really appreciate it.”

“But to me, it’s fun, and because it’s a round-the-clock job, it keeps you plenty busy,” she says. “When there’s time, I get a lot of reading and sewing done. “OK, the money does help,” she adds, “but it’s really not all that much. I’ll tell you the real reward. It’s doing something that’s still useful and responsible.”

“Let’s face it, this (sitter) job is God-sent,” says 68-year-old Martha Baker, a former schoolteacher from Maryland, one of seven sitters with the Anaheim Home Watchers agency. “It helps senior citizens to remain in the mainstream. It keeps us interacting with other, younger people.”

Besides, says Martha, citing a less lofty but highly enticing factor, “we can work as often as we want, and still have time to visit family and friends.”

And to travel a lot.

The next trip for Martha is the British Isles. For Mary, an Amtrak trek to Chicago via New Mexico. For the Conklins, a trip abroad, perhaps to Thailand.

Yes, but. . . . When they are out of town, who takes care of their homes?

It’s simple. Mary shares the two-bedroom mobile home in Garden Grove with her sister and brother-in-law. Martha resides in Leisure World, the gated, high-security retirement community in Laguna Hills.

And the Conklins? They found their sitters right next door to their own three-bedroom house in San Dimas--their son and his family.