What's All This About Home Exchanging?

A few people have asked us about our home exchange experiences. It seems to be a mysterious process that many people feel is a bit risky, and I can see why someone might think that.

Because we offer this...

 

Our space...

We've done four home exchanges so far. Why? Well, it provides us with free housing in a desired location, as well as the luxury of making our own food and having more space than a tiny hotel room. It also opens up the world to us. We'd never planned on going to Australia so soon, but when we received an offer of a home exchange we thought "why not?"

...we got to visit home...

...see this...

It can be a tricky proposition. There was no way that I was flying for 33 hours (oh, had it only been that little) to stay somewhere for two weeks, so we sent out requests for exchanges in a few other places before we agreed to the original offer.

...have this for a time...

...eat that...

How does it work? We belong to HomeLink, a Canadian home exchange company that has been in business since 1953. It's kind of like a dating site, but for homes instead of people. With over 60,000 members, there's a lot of selection all over the world. Once you set up your home's profile and a bit about yourselves you can indicate where you're interested in going and when or you can just leave the field open and see what comes up. If someone wants to exchange with you, they send you an email through the company and you can discuss terms, view the photos of their property and find out a bit about your potential exchange partners. If you like what you see, you can fill in a exchange form and basically swap houses.  There is also a site based in the US, of about an equal size, but hasn't been around as long, called HomeExchange. There are also sites in Europe. The sites charge a fee to join, usually nothing exorbitant, but is a way of filtering out false home swappers etc.

...do this...

You don't have to trade at the same time, you can do non-simultaneous exchanges, meaning you stay in your partners house at some point and they stay at yours at another time. This means you have to be prepared to pay for (or mooch off friends) space somewhere else, but if you're going somewhere that doesn't have an exchange home, no harm no foul, right? 

Is it risky? Well, not really. The statistics support that; damage, theft and fraud track at under 1% of home exchanges. Would you rip someone off who was staying in your own home? The transgressor wouldn't last very long on the home exchange site if they have bad behaviour. You also tend to exchange with people who have properties similar to your own. 

...and experience this!

Find out more: Home Exchange University is an unbiased site that compares home exchange sites (They also have a prior site called Home Exchange Guru).

Home exchange isn't for everyone. You have to be okay with other people being in your home when you're not there. (We look at is as additional security...even if we're not there, we might have guests.) So far we've been really pleased and have only had one dish broken. The rest of the place has been well taken care of.