ExchangeHomesBlog.com

At the moment there is an ongoing widespread discussion on some of the home exchange blogs about the questionable fact where many companies are turning a blind eye to owners of rentals who enroll their properties under the guise of being for home exchange, when nothing could be further from the truth.

The situation isn’t helped by the naiveté of the press and media who then look at these clubs’ enormously inflated membership numbers and immediately throw up their hands in glee and recommend them as being the “biggest” and “best”.

ExchangeHomes.com clearly publishes and enforces the following policy:

ExchangeHomes.Com is a HOME EXCHANGE organization. All properties listed with us must offer Home Exchange as the primary alternative. However, we do understand that many members do use a second or vacation home as their exchange property and provided that home exchange is their first alternative, they can list rental as a second option. Specific reference to rental charges etc., are not allowed. This information can be conveyed to interested parties after they initiate inquiries. Any listing that is reported to be soliciting for rental will be removed and no fees refunded.

This statement can be found on both our Membership Form and in our Frequently Asked Questions.

We also rigorously enforce all off-site links that members include in their listings and if they lead to blatant rental web sites, they are removed immediately.

We also check all edits that are made to listings throughout their membership period because a lot of rental owners will initially list with a very innocent description, only to replace everything with a full-blown rental advertisement after a couple of weeks, assuming we only check new listings for content.

Of course, we aren’t stupid, and we fully appreciate that there will always be rental property owners who appear to follow all the rules, but still expect to convert home exchange inquiries into rentals.

All we can do is ask our members to immediately report any instances of this to us and provided they can back up their claim with a copy of a written solicitation they have received, the offending listing is immediately removed.

We have taken this action on a number of occasions, and once or twice it’s caused unpleasantness. One rental owner called me a “Control freak” and another seemed to genuinely believe that because she was allowed to list and openly promote her rental with one of our rival companies, we were somehow obliged to provide her the same privileges.

She told me I was doing myself no favors by turning away her business. Well, I happen to disagree emphatically. As our Guidelines state, ExchangeHomes.com is a Home Exchange company.

Several years ago I tried running a rentals only web site parallel to the one for home exchange and I offered rental property owners listings at exactly the same price. If they added an obvious rental to ExchangeHomes, I even went so far as to move it to the other site for them. Their response was abysmal and after two years it closed. Clearly they are only interested in listing on the home exchange sites because they then gain immediate access to a prime database of travelers.

Well, maybe after all that rental property owner has got a point in as much as ExchangeHomes will more than likely never achieve huge membership numbers because we choose to turn away rentals, but at least I shall continue to have the moral satisfaction of knowing that I’m behaving ethically to our home exchange members.

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