Frequently Asked Questions about Home Swapping
General Questions
Sometimes you won’t be able to swap your home at the same time as the other person.
A hosted swap is where you host the other person at your home as a guest during their vacation and when you’re ready to have your vacation you are then hosted as a guest at their home.
The most important thing to remember is that both families or people will be in the others house at the same time.
A standard swap is where you simultaneously swap homes with the other party. You both arrange to travel on the same dates and arrive at each others homes whilst the other is at your home.
Just because a house isn’t comparable to your own doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t swap. In fact it’s probably one of the best reasons to swap! Living for a short time in a different city means that there are different factors that determine a homes value.
A great example is a lovely large home in Atlanta may not be comparable in size to that of a London flat. However, the experience of seeing Big Ben and then returning to a cozy flat can’t be replaced with a large living room.
Home swapping is about doing a deal, saving some money and making wonderful memories. Don’t get too caught up in the little things.
Yes, in most cases swapping homes is still legal for tenants. It’s usally a good idea to check your lease to make sure there are no stipulations against it however.
We also suggest if you are swapping with someone who is a tenant that you ask that they pay the rent up front for the time of your stay, this helps to mitigate any non-payment of rent type issues that could arise.
By swapping your home your effectively removing your entire hotel accomodation cost from your holiday. This usually amounts to an average of $300 to $500 per night for a family.
With an average stay of a week in any location you can expect to save between $2,100 to $3,500 per week.
Not a bad saving for letting someone stay in what would normally be an empty home…
Absolutely, a home isn’t just a house. People love to swap their homes with inner city flats or apartments near the beach. Usually apartments have communal features such as pools or gyms so don’t forget to mention these in your listings!
Setting up your listing
Yes, adding your listing is free. Once you have added your listing to the website, you will then need to become a member to contact others to initiate swaps.
We don’t have home swap points. We feel that the system of home swapping points is not in the spirit of true home swapping. We believe that everyones home has a unique feature or location and that by swapping with others you both get to enjoy each others cities for a while.
We don’t see ourselves adding any kind of home swapping point to swapourhome.com anytime in the future.
Absolutely YES. Adding pictures is the best way to show people how special your home is. We recommend adding a picture of the front and back of your home, as well as the bedrooms and living spaces. Having a kitchen picture is always a good idea as well.
Yes, if you feel that there is a listing on the site that breaches our site rules, terms and conditions or is just plain offensive you can use the “Report” button at the top of the listing to send us a direct message. Once we have received a report, we will look into the listing as soon as we can.
Swapping Safety
We understand that when you talk to someone on the internet you don’t really “know” them. Although we do charge people for a membership that allows them to contact people on the site, this really just verifies that the person has a valid payment method and isn’t a robot.
What we highly recommend doing before any swap is doing a video chat with the person or family you are swapping with. Give them a tour of your home and get them to give you a tour of theirs. Make sure it looks the same as the pictures and the people fit their profile.
A little bit of checking isn’t a bad thing, and you will probably find the other swapper appreciates it as well.
Sometimes people feel more comfortable if they have a deposit from each other in case your guest isn’t 100% as honest as they appeared when you spoke to them.
If you feel you need a deposit from the other swapper and vice versa we recommend using an online escrow service to handle the transaction. This means that neither party holds onto the deposit. It is held onto by a third party and then at the end of your stay you both agree to release the money back to each other. Services like escrow.com can handle this for you.
It’s important to note there are fee’s for escrow.
The short answer is no. It is highly unusual that someone should ask for payment for services on swapourhome. We recommend not providing any swapper with your credit card, bank account details or any other payment method on or off the site.
You should store any item that you consider valuable in a safe place where your guests will be unable to access it. (Safe, locked room, secure cupboard, etc.)
You can also deliver valuable items to trusted family members to take care of whilst you are away.
Anything that you consider valuable that may be too large to move you should simply ask your guests not to touch it, or leave them a note. Most people will be fine with this.
Finally, if your home is not child safe it may be best to not allow swaps with families with small children. This gives you the best chance to avoid any costly mishaps.
Remember, the best thing you can do is get to know your guests. Talk to them before the swap and learn about who they are and what both you and they are expecting from the swap.
If you have taken a deposit and used an escrow service, then the first thing to do would be to put a stop on any return funds. Once you have done this, then you will need to contact the police in your local area and file a report. This isn’t something we can directly help you with and needs to be filed with local police as soon as possible.
Memberships
When you first register on our website you are able to add your home, search for the perfect vacation destination and browse all of our listings. You however will need to become a member when you are ready to start contacting people about making a home swap.
Becoming a member allows you to contact other members to start your swap. Once you become a member the “Contact Member” section all of the listing pages will become “un-locked” and will allow you to send messages to each other.
No, you don’t need to become a member to list your home. This means you can use our service for free to get your pictures up, your descriptions right and everything else.
Becoming a member allows you to contact other members to start your swap. Once you become a member the “Contact Member” section all of the listing pages will become “un-locked” and will allow you to send messages to each other.
We have extremely cheap membership at the moment because our site is almost brand new. What this means is that we don’t have as many listings on our website as we would like. By offering cheap membership you get to do your first swaps at almost nothing, whilst we get to grow the number of listings on our site.
We’re currently a really new home swapping platform and don’t have many listings. With this in mind we’ve released really cheap membership packages to grow our site for early adopters.
We know that providing your payment details to a company can be scary, however rest assured that we’re dedicated to keeping your information safe.
To keep everything secure we use a payment processor called “Stripe”. They allow us to process your card quickly and securely without the need for us to store your details on our website.
Stripe provides payment processing to some of the biggest companies in the world. If you want to know more feel free to visit them at stripe.com.