Successful Home Exchanging - Contacting Fellow Home Exchangers

Okay, so you’ve joined the home exchange club of your choice—hopefully ExchangeHomes.com—and set up your listing, including adding some illustrative photographs. Now it’s time to begin contacting fellow members. Don’t make the serious mistake of adding a listing (no matter how great you think it may be), and then sit back and assume that your work’s over. No way— now the work of sorting through the listings for likely exchange partners and initiating contact begins.

Don’t restrict your contacts to those that specifically list an interest in the area where you live. Approach the job from the opposite direction, by first isolating all the listings in the area you hope to exchange to. Eliminate any that would be poor matches due to the size of the home or composition of the family, then send a contact email to the remainder. All it costs you is a little time and you never know whose interest you may pique.

Having said that, don’t become one of the new brand of “home exchange spammers” who fire off hundreds of contact emails, then only communicate further with those replies that they perceive as the cream, leaving the remainder wondering what is going on. That’s just plain bad manners.

Always respond to every contact email your receive, whether it’s a cold contact or a reply to your own mailing. This is one overriding issue we constantly have to deal with, members contact us unable to understand why their emails are receiving poor responses. Often it’s because the recipient’s email providers are directing the initial contacts straight into their spam folders and they empty the folder periodically without first checking its contents.

Another important tip involves broadening your horizons. The more flexible you can be with your destination and dates, the easier it will be to arrange a swap. In the scope of things it’s highly unlikely that any home exchange company will be able to match you with home exchange partners living in exactly the area you’re hoping to visit and seeking a swap to your location at identical dates to your own. Compromises play a huge role in successful home exchanges!

About Your Listing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 11:52 am and is filed under About Your Listing, Home Exchange Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to the comments RSS Feed.