In-home pet care is bought on trust and sold on spreadsheets, and the two do not describe the same thing.
A client list of four hundred households looks like an asset. Whether it is depends entirely on who those households think they are hiring, and that is the first thing to establish.
The question that decides the price
Take the top twenty households by revenue. For each one, ask: which sitter do they request by name?
If the answer is the owner for most of them, you are buying a book that may not survive the handover, and you should structure the price around that rather than argue about it. If the answers are spread across four or five sitters who are staying, the business is genuinely a business.
Then ask what happens when the requested sitter is unavailable. A household that accepts a substitute has a relationship with the business. One that cancels and books elsewhere has a relationship with a person.
Read the repeat rate across three years
A twelve-month view will mislead you in this vertical more than any other.
Households use sitting when they travel, so a loyal client might appear twice in a year, or not at all if their trips fell outside the window. Ask for households booking in each of the last three years, and how many booked in consecutive years.
Consecutive-year repeat is the number that tells you what you are buying. Fifty-five percent of households coming back the following year is a solid book. Twenty percent means the business is re-acquiring its customers every year and the marketing cost is the real cost structure.
Ask for revenue split by service too. Daily drop-in visits, overnights, and full house sits behave differently: overnights and house sits are higher value, more personal and more at risk on handover.
The sitters
This is where the business either exists or does not.
Are they staying? Ask to meet them, with the seller's agreement. Ask each how long they have been sitting, whether they do it elsewhere as well, and what they plan to do after the sale. Listen to the hesitation.
Are they engaged lawfully? Assigned jobs, rates set by the business, business clients, business branding and no genuine right to substitute looks like employment whatever the paperwork says. Misclassification exposure can travel with the business. Get advice on the actual arrangement rather than the label, and read where the line sits in pet services.
Are they bound? Written agreements with reasonable restraints aimed at the households they have sat for. Without one, a departing sitter can take their clients and there is little you can do.
Are they checked? Police checks, references, first aid, and anything the insurer requires. Ask for the file for each sitter. A business that cannot produce them has been running on trust it never verified, and you would be inheriting that.
What you inherit at settlement
Forward bookings and deposits. Christmas and Easter are booked months ahead. Get the schedule per booking with the deposit held, and apportion it in the contract. These are stays you will deliver with money the seller has already spent.
Prepaid visit credits. Visits paid for and not used. Deduct the full value. In Petboost these export from the Packages tab with value remaining per customer, and credits do not expire.
Keys and access. You are taking custody of entry to dozens of homes. Ask for the register and inspect how it is kept. Keys labelled with addresses in an unlocked drawer is a finding, not a detail. Insist that every client is written to before settlement, told their key is transferring, and offered it back.
Access knowledge. Alarm codes, which door sticks, where the medication is, which cat bolts. If this lives in the seller's head, you are buying a book you cannot service. If it lives on the client records in the booking system, the handover works.
Open complaints or claims. Ask directly, in writing. In-home work carries property damage risk as well as animal risk.
Insurance, before you exchange
Get your own quote with the actual activity list: in-home visits, overnight stays, house sitting, key custody, transporting animals if you do.
Public liability, care custody and control, and cover for damage in a client's home are not the same thing and a policy may carry one without the others. Key custody cover matters specifically, because the exposure is not the key, it is the cost of rekeying a house.
Do not assume the seller's premium is yours. Pet business cover is worth a proper read.
Direct or platform
Ask what share of bookings came through a marketplace and what share came direct.
Platform clients pay the platform, message through the platform and belong to the platform. They are not reliably transferable and the commission is already out of the margin. Direct clients, booking on the business's own page with their details on the business's system, are the ones you are actually buying.
If most of the book is platform-sourced, you are buying a listing and a reputation rather than a client base, and that is worth a great deal less.
Rebuild the numbers
Put a proper wage in for every hour the owner works, including the overnights, which are frequently unpaid in an owner-operator's accounts. Add the insurance at your quote. Add the mileage properly, since a book spread across a wide area burns hours in the car.
Then look at whether the margin survives. It often does, but only when the sitters are paid correctly and the geography is sensible.
Walk away if
- The top households all request the owner personally, and the owner is leaving
- Sitters have no written agreements and no restraints
- Police checks and insurance records cannot be produced for the sitters
- The key register is informal and clients were never told who holds what
- Most bookings come through a marketplace rather than direct
The first ninety days
Attend as many jobs as you physically can, alongside the existing sitter. The household needs to see continuity and meet you at the same time.
Send a letter in your own name in week one saying what is not changing, and be specific about keys.
Keep every sitter you can, and pay them promptly. In this vertical the sitters are the constraint on growth and the reason clients stay, and losing two in your first month costs more than any efficiency you might gain.
See Trips · Petboost for pet sitting · Selling a pet sitting business
