Successful Home Exchanging – Finalizing Your Exchange
Part Seven of the Series
This post will conclude my series of posts walking you through the entire process of selecting your home exchange club, setting up your listing, making contacts and, most important, finalizing the home exchange arrangements.
Finalizing your arrangements can be critically important and unfortunately it’s one aspect of home swapping that some members often pay the least attention to. In short – discuss everything that you feel is significant. Don’t ever be reluctant to raise a point you believe to be important, and once you’ve done so, make sure you follow it through to a satisfactory conclusion.
If any information your exchange partner provides is unclear, ALWAYS ask for an explanation. Sometimes there can be misunderstandings over terminology, even between people speaking and writing the same language.
Over the years, whenever members have contacted us to complain about some aspect of their home exchange, without fail we’ve always discovered one of two things:
- The matter they’re dissatisfied with was never discussed and resolved during the process of finalizing the arrangements.
- They didn’t bother with drawing up and having both parties sign a formal Home Exchange Agreement. An agreement is very important in avoiding any misunderstandings.
One experienced member with multiple swaps under her belt admitted to me the other day that she and her husband hadn’t bothered with a formal agreement BECAUSE they considered themselves experienced and therefore didn’t deem it to be necessary. They had just completed an exchange with a family who were completely new to the concept and from what I was able to gather, discussions had been minimal and the necessity of an agreement was never once addressed. Nothing major had gone wrong with the exchange, but there were several aspects where the other party had used the home and car somewhat liberally.
ExchangeHomes.com provides free access to a whole variety of Home Exchange Forms and documents, including an excellent Agreement. All of these can be downloaded Here. Scroll down the page to view the list.
We also recommend that once your Home Exchange Agreement is worded to the complete satisfaction of both parties, you use a web site such as EchSign.com to digitally sign it. All you have to do is upload or fax in an agreement that needs to be signed, and EchoSign e-mails it to the other party. This service is completely free.
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[...] The importance of using a Home Exchange Agreement was also the subject of a recent post— Finalizing Your Exchange. [...]
June 21st, 2009 at 1:14 pm