ExchangeHomesBlog.com » Home Exchange Guide

Home Exchange Guide To the Area

Anne — Mon, 24 May 2010 15:29:59 +0000

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In all our advice in preparing for for an upcoming home exchange, we always list an ongoing “Home Exchange Book” where each party lists necessary information about the house, the appliances, security system, emergency telephone numbers, etc. But don’t stop there …

Visit Google or Bing Maps and print off directions to all places of interest and amenities.
Collect menus from your favorite local restaurants, take-outs, delivery services, etc.
Include bus and train timetables.
Most local newspapers include a calendar of upcoming events. Visit their website and print one covering the upcoming home exchange dates.
Include brochures from all local places of interest you can think of: museums, sporting venues, them parks, competitions, fairs, beaches, lakes, etc.
Begin clipping grocery coupons from local newspapers, free publications, store handouts, etc. and include them in your information package. Your exchange partners will be grocery shopping and will love the savings.

Home Exchanges With Children

Linda Harris — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:00:51 +0000

When you go into a home exchange, your thoughts are usually focused on the excitement of living in a new place for a while. At the same time, there is always some level of concern about other people living in your home, particularly if the people you’re exchanging with have children. When doing a home exchange with a family with little kids, keep these tips in mind so that you don’t have to worry about what your home will look like when you return.

Don’t Display, Pack It Away
You really don’t have to keep all those fragile little trinkets out in the living room. Instead, put any delicate decorations on a high closet shelf till you return, or put them inside a lift top coffee table and request that the lid stay down. You’ll be able to get everything set up once you get back, and your home will remain intact.

Lay Down Some Ground Rules
No shoes on the sofa, no eating in the bedroom, no ball throwing indoors. If you’re worried that making such requests is rude or presumptuous, don’t be. You have the right to set up some guidelines for what goes on in your home when you’re not there, and the parents you are swapping homes with will be grateful that you are being upfront about your expectations.

Close With Cleaning
No matter how well-behaved these kids might be, mess is simply a reality of life with children. In order to make sure that you don’t come home to a major cleaning fest, suggest that each of you have the house professionally cleaned at the end of the exchange. This way you can expect a clean home without anyone being insulted.

Even with the best laid plans and the most watchful parents, things can still go wrong, so expect to see some signs of wear and tear. If you’re still anxious about the idea of a boisterous bunch moving into your home, then maybe swapping with a large family isn’t right for you. There are plenty of couples without children who would be happy to exchange homes with you, and that might make for a more worry-free vacation.

Linda Harris writes about family-friendly furniture and home decor at Timber and Textiles.

Trusting Your Home Exchange Partners

Anne — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:56:45 +0000

The question I am repeatedly asked is, “Why should I not be worried about having a stranger in my house?”

My immediate response is always the same, “Why should your potential exchange partners not be worried about having you in THEIR house?”

Be rational and pause for a moment to think: Why should you assume your home exchange partners are joining a home exchange agency for the sole purpose of moving into your home and robbing it, yet you expect them to see you as pure innocents looking for nothing more than an affordable vacation?

ExchangeHomes.com has been continually involved in home exchanging since 1986—that’s 23 years at the time of writing! During those 23 years I’ve never had a single report of theft, vandalism, malicious mischief, or anything else that could even vaguely categorized at a criminal act associated with home exchanging.

Mutual trust has to be the fundamental principle of successful home exchanging, so if you are someone who lacks that inerrant ability, it’s likely that home exchange probably isn’t the best travel solution for you.

Home Exchange Is Hard Work

Anne — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 16:21:18 +0000

Since the release of that silly movie “The Holiday”, too many people have labored under the misconception that arranging a home exchange is easy—a piece of cake!

This simply isn’t true. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not putting home exchanging down—just being realistic!

Unless you happen to live in a home that is perfect in every way, and it’s located in a highly sought after location, joining a home exchange club and sending out just one or two inquiry emails is NOT going to represent the total effort required.

First you need to put together an eye-catching, attractive listing including lots of photographs. Listings that don’t contain photographs get passed over—it’s a proven fact. Even worse, some members even view listings without photographs with suspicion, wondering what the member is hiding.

Second you will need to sieve through all the listings and locate everything that could work for you. Flexibility is the key. Without flexibility your chances of locating and setting up a successful exchange are reduced drastically. It’s very difficult to find another member living exactly where you wish to go and who wants to travel to your home town during identical dates.

If you are tied in to specific dates that simply cannot be moved then try to be extra flexible with your location. The United Kingdom is comprised of many more cities than London. The entire UK is served by an excellent road and rail system and because it’s tiny (compared to the US, for example), access to London will never be much more than a couple of hours.

Exactly the same argument applies with Paris, Rome, etc.

You also need to put a lot of effort into your actual contact emails. Just dashing of a line “are you interested in exchanging to xyz?” won’t win you any friends. In fact a fellow home exchange blogger stated categorically that she flat-out ignores each and every email like that. She considers them to be rude and she has no interest in entrusting her home to such people.

Your Admin Area in ExchangeHomes.com allows you to store a “template” email that you can use repeatedly when initiating contacts. The key here is the word “template”. Make the effort to tweak and personalize it appropriately each time. It’s extremely easy to do, just read the member’s listing carefully first and slot in a few pertinent references.

The home exchange code of ethics also requires that you ALWAYS reply, no matter how briefly to every email you receive. Lack of response to emails represents 99% of the complaints we receive from members and often it’s not the result of bad manners.

Here are the most common reasons you may not receive a response to inquiry emails:

The member has changed their email address and forgotten to update their listing.
Their email provider has routed the message straight into their spam folder (which they then routinely empty without first checking).
They are away from home and don’t have regular access to their email.
They or a member of their family may be ill and checking email has slipped down on their agenda.
They are overwhelmed with exchange offers.
The member’s first language isn’t English and they are struggling to understand your email to them

The last point immediately raises another issue. If you are looking for an exchange where the language is different to your own, your offer(s) will put you streets ahead of everyone else’s if you can have your inquiry email translated prior to sending. There are plenty of free translation services on the internet and the result will be far from perfect, but it will show that you are prepared to try. Send both versions of the inquiry email.

The next effort on your part will be required for communicate back and forth between yourself and the members who respond to your inquiries, and the members who initiate inquiries themselves. This stage is crucial. Communicate, communicate and communicate some more. The more communication back and forth, the less chance for any misunderstandings.

Communicate in every way possible: by email, by instant messenger, by phone. Discuss everything that’s important to you (and the people you’re negotiating with) and don’t close any issue until agreement has been reached. Don’t compromise on anything unless you understand and are fully prepared to deal with the resulting consequences.

These communications will quickly eliminate any exchange partners you clearly won’t wish to move further forward with and when you reach the point where you and another member/family are completely happy with everything discussed, always finalize the process with both parties completing and signing a Home Exchange Agreement (sometimes called a contract). Sample Agreements can be downloaded Here.

Home Exchange Club Memberships vs Classified Advertising

Anne — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:29:14 +0000

Usually I try to keep abreast of the multitude of things being written on the web on the subject of home exchanging. On an average day I will find several new postings and if appropriate I like to spend a few minutes responding.

Recently I’ve become more than a little concerned by the number of of postings encouraging potential home exchangers to bypass the multitude of home exchange clubs now available to them and instead seek home exchange partners via CraigsList or CouchSurfing.com. The latter site is fundamentally a hospitality exchange network, it’s especially popular among students and young people in general traveling the world, but neither is a substitute for a good, reliable, established home exchange service.

In all the years Exchangehomes.com has been in business (22+), we’ve never received a single report of theft or vandalism or malicious damage. We’ve very occasionally had to deal with a situation where a member was let down at the last minute, but in all but two cases the cancellations were caused by accidents or totally unexpected illnesses. Each time we were able to “put out the word” via this blog, our newsletter and even specialized mailings to members in the area to which the let down family was planning to travel and were usually able to locate a suitable alternative.

In fact, on one occasion we were even able to help while we were living in California by doing a last minute swap ourselves with a family from Bristol.

The point of all this is to illustrate the very important fact that when you join a good, established home exchange organization you are essentially paying for much more than simply publishing you home exchange requirements. All of the “for fee” clubs offer a Customer Service and if they are anything like Exchangehomes.com they will pull out all the stops to help in an emergancy. On the other hand who is going to help you if you have an issue with a potential CraigsList home exchange partner?

Last year and already this year we’ve been contacted by folk who were under the impression that they had reached firm, committed agreements with people they had found via CraigsList, only to have them either cancel at the last minute, or even more despicable, simply cut off all communication. One had even changed his email address and phone number.

I fully expect a lot of people will interpret this post as being “sour grapes”, but that’s not the case at all. I believe I’m justifiably proud of the good reputation generally enjoyed by home exchanging and it concerns me when I see a very definite possibility of that reputation being compromised. Other clubs should feel the same way as well. By choosing not to stay in a hotel or rent a vacation home, potential home exchangers are already saving themselves a substantial chunk of change, so why begrudge the comparatively small fee charged by a reputable home exchange organization?

That fee even covers a full year’s membership and with just a little forward planning, several home exchanges can be arranged before it expires.

Home Exchange Agreements / Contracts

Anne — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:42:07 +0000

I was somewhat disappointed to read a post this morning on another home exchange blog referencing an email the author had received from a New York home exchanger requesting information about putting together a ‘Home Exchange Contract’— or as we call it—’Agreement’.

ExchangeHomes.com offers templates for Home Exchange Agreements, Car Exchange Agreements and a Home Exchange ‘Book’ in both PDF and MS Word formats, as, I’m sure do most of the major home exchange organizations. What’s so disappointing is that most of our members never explore the goodies that are available for them to utilize, and I guess it’s the same for members of other clubs as well.

Agreements / Contracts seem to be a hot issue at the moment because recently I’ve repeatedly been discussing their importance with members. Just last weekend a lady who has been an ExchangeHomes.com for twenty years admitted to me that she has never utilized an Agreement and also that she had no idea she could download a template from the website.

The ExchangeHomes.com templates can be reached by clicking >> Here or, anyone on the website can click the Help Center link, then Sample Forms and Agreements under the Miscellaneous sub-heading.

The importance of using a Home Exchange Agreement was also the subject of a recent post— Finalizing Your Exchange.

I hear from a lot of members who steadfastly believe them to be unnecessary, but as I’ve been explaining to those I’ve had conversations with recently, I’ve yet to hear of an exchange that encountered problems following the completion and signing of an Agreement. Okay— it’s probably not a legal document, but it serves to gather together every important point and issue that arose during the process of arranging the exchange; all those little details that spanned numerous emails, and several phone conversations. Everything is laid out in one document. It also acts as a final buffer against anyone who may possibly renege at the last moment.

As I point out to our members, if the person they are negotiating with is opposed to signing an Agreement, ask them why, and if they persist in not signing they should contact us immediately.

Successful Home Exchanging – Finalizing Your Exchange

Anne — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:15:14 +0000

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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Successful Home Exchanging – Contacting Fellow Home Exchangers

Anne — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:52:05 +0000

Okay, so you’ve joined the [tag-tec]home exchange club[/tag-tec] 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 “[tag-tec]home exchange[/tag-tec] 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 [tag-tec]home exchange[/tag-tec] company will be able to match you with [tag-tec]home exchange[/tag-tec] 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!
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Successful Home Exchanging – Good Photographs Are Important

Anne — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:38:36 +0000

Part Five of the Series

To help our Home Exchange members, I asked a photographer friend for a few basic tips for amateurs hoping to produce some attractive, illustrative pictures to include in their home exchange listings. His words of wisdom follow …..

Use Digital Cameras Only With Still Shots

Most home-use digital cameras have a one- or two-second delay before shooting. That’s perfectly fine when taking a picture of your new car or the vineyards in the wine country of California. Photography school instructors warn, however, that digital cameras are not always great for shooting moving objects such as pets, wildlife, children in action or sporting events. If you have to be sure you get the shot at an exact moment, a film camera will work best.

Use Flash Outdoors

While flash is traditionally thought of as an indoor-only feature, it also has many applications outside. The sun can create shadows over faces and images. Pros know that using flash outdoors can counteract the effects of the sun on your photos.

Get Close

It’s a common mistake in amateur photography to take pictures of people from a far distance. The normal result is a picture with people so small they aren’t identifiable. For better pictures, get up close, so you can see the person’s face well. This way you can clearly see the person or people in the picture.

Photography is a combination of creative art and science. The more creative you become, the more interest you’ll find in your pictures. The more you know about the science of photography, the more control you’ll have over the outcome. Read articles (there are hundreds, even thousands on the Internet), practice and experiment. Soon, you’ll be taking expert-quality photos just like the pros!

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Successful Home Exchanging – Additional Listing Tactics

Anne — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:25:24 +0000

Part Four of the Series
It’s worth remembering that there are several ways you can “dress up” your basic [tag-tec]home exchange listing[/tag-tec]. Here are some suggestions:

Set up your own personal web site dedicated to [tag-tec]home exchanging[/tag-tec]. Have sections devoted to your family, your home, pets, neighborhood and more general location. Describe any previous [tag-tec]home exchanges[/tag-tec] you may have taken.
- Describe the amenities your home offers in great detail.
- Go to town detailing special features.
- Provide on-line links to any relevant manuals or fact sheets.
- Illustrate the information with photographs.
Subscribe to one of the on-line photo albums such as PhotoBucket, MyPhotoAlbum or Flickr and pack it with lots of bright, cheerful, informative photographs.
If you have a video camera, use it to make a video introducing your home, family, pets, car (if it’s going to be part of an exchange), and add it to your online photo album (see suggestion 2 above).

Include links to these features in your online listing and also in every contact email you send out.

These features will make your listing much more interesting to prospective home exchange partners, but remember, don’t ever make the mistake of relying upon them to convey your message. Your listing with your online club is what will attract initial interest and if you fail there no-one will hang around to see any amount of extra features you may add.

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Successful Home Exchanging – Setting Up Your Listing

Anne — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:46:36 +0000

Part Thee of a Series.

The way in which you set up your online listing for the world to see is often pivotal to your home exchange success. You need to clearly describe your home and the amenities it has to offer, then you need to introduce your family, your children, teens and give their ages. Explain any interests or hobbies you pursue—this will allow readers an opportunity to temp you with similar topics in their location.

Next, give some careful thought to a description of the area where your home is located. Your part of town. What shops are nearby? Are there churches, recreational facilities, a railway station, bus stop on a main route, doctor, dentist, pub, restaurant, garage?

Then step back and describe the vacation possibilities offered by a much larger surrounding area. What notable features are available for day trips? This is important because it allows readers to envisage your home exchange in a much bigger picture. They may very well be seeking a swap with one of the places you list as being comparatively close by.

Don’t imagine you are saving a few seconds of typing time by resorting to shortened word versions. These abbreviations are frequently not even understood by people from other countries, and just as important, the lack of care this implies gives a bad first impression about you as a likely home exchange partner. Readers will simply move on to an easier to read listing.

Answer all the multiple choice questions accurately and completely. All too often we find these have been skimped over and this is a shame, because on the ExchangeHomes.com web site, points from these are often pulled out as highlights in the listing’s full page display.

Finally, get clicking with your camera and take a whole variety of photographs illustrating your home and its location. If you’re asking for pet care it’s also an excellent idea to include a picture of the pets involved. Take more pictures than you will need then pick out just the best to add to your listing.

With ExchangeHomes.com you can add an unlimited number of photographs and explain each one with a caption.

I suggest you view your listing as a resume. It’s constantly stated that a resume’s first five seconds are critical. At that point the reader is either sufficiently impressed to continue, or tosses it aside. Just like a resume, your home exchange listing is competing with thousands of others. It has to qualify itself for further reading and consideration.

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Successful Home Exchanging – More About Selecting A Club

Anne — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:17:20 +0000

This is part two of a series I’ve been asked to write covering successful home exchange procedures.

In my last post I began working on the process of selecting the home exchange club you decide to sign up with. Here are a few more thoughts about that same subject:

A Genuine Home Exchange Businesses should be Established-
Genuine home exchange businesses should be able to tell you how long they have been around, who owns the company and other details that you would normally expect a business to provide. If they can’t provide these simple details then you should be wary.

Genuine Home Exchange Businesses should have happy members-
You should be able to get testimonials from people who have joined the organization and have been satisfied with it, other than the people who are trying to sell you a membership. The people who gave these testimonials should also be current, active, listed members.

Genuine Home Exchange Clubs should be contactable-
You shouldn’t just have an email for the company but you should also be provided with a telephone number and full, physical mailing address (not just a PO Box) and preferably as many details as possible. If people do not give all their contact details be wary because they may be trying to hide.

Take a look at their listings—all their listings should be available for you to view. Do they clearly display each one’s expiration date? Are they genuine HOME EXCHANGE offers, or nothing more than the owners of vacation properties using an inexpensive means of promoting their rentals?

A lot of “start-up” sites display old, long outdated listings indefinitely, and even some of the more established clubs mingle straight rental offerings with their genuine home exchange listings.

Finally, beware of “Free” clubs. In this day and age something for nothing should be viewed as a reg flag of warning, never as an opportunity to save a few dollars. 99% of the members of free clubs join on a whim and are totally uncommitted. So many clubs bear confusingly similar names—after all, how many ways can the term “home exchanging” be expressed when searching for a URL and name? Several times a week the phone at ExchangeHomes.com rings and it’s someone asking if they signed up with us X-amount of months ago. Invariably they joined a free club and now cannot remember which one it was.

Similarly, on three occasions last summer I answered calls from distressed members of various free clubs, all of whom had been let down at the last minute. They had received no guidance from their clubs, no home exchange agreements had been completed, and even worse, one was totally unable to contact the owner of the club because no contact information was available on the web site.

So—to sum up: go with experience; go with a club that’s clearly available for contact, and expect to pay a small membership fee. That fee buys you peace of mind and membership with the genuine article!

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Successful Home Exchanging – Selecting a Club

Anne — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:40:34 +0000

This is part one of a much requested series I’ve been asked to write covering successful home exchange procedures.

The first thing you will need to do is select a club. It’s very inadvisable to even think about cutting out this comparatively small expenditure and go it alone with classified advertisements or an ad on Craigslist, joining a club gives you the immediate peace of mind of knowing that you are joining a like minded group of people that have provided the organization with their personal information and in most cases have listed their own home exchange offer.

Club selection has in itself become a great deal easier with the launch of CHECtravel. With the recent explosive growth in the home exchange industry, an organization such as CHECTravel will do an immense amount to unite the legitimate clubs under an unbiased umbrella association. Both individual Home Exchange members and the clubs themselves can do nothing but benefit from the exceptionally high standards and code of conduct CHECTravel has established and pledges to maintain.

To pull a quote from their opening page:

“All of our affiliated clubs and individual CHEC members have been approved by an independent committee consisting of club owners, industry professionals and experienced home exchangers. CHEC-certified agencies have agreed to uphold CHEC’s high ethical standards of behavior for themselves and their members”.

Of course, CHECtravel has only just launched so there are a number of very good clubs not yet affiliated with them. Application and acceptance has to be a time consuming process. But without a doubt they are providing a very legitimate yardstick for newcomers to use.

More next time …..
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A Guide to Setting Up Your Home Exchange

Anne — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 12:49:37 +0000

Despite the fact that ExchangeHomes.com has always offered what we call our “Hints and Advice book” in PDF format, for either reading online, or downloading to your computer, where it can be printed, if desired, I’m still frequently asked to include some clear directions for locating and arranging a successful home exchange in this blog.

Of course, that’s exactly what the ExchangeHomesBlog has always been about. It was given life with a purpose to help and advise, entertain and sometimes amuse home exchangers. But apparently a significant number of readers feel that a series of linked posts, taking them by the hand and walking them through the entire process would be beneficial, so, over a period of time, that’s what I will attempt to do. Look for the first post in this series very soon.

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