June 20th, 2006

Filed under:
Mixed Bag, Web 2.0, Web Design
21 Comments »

My Kingdom for a Great Home Exchange Site

I’ve been casually checking out some home exchange (or ‘house swap’, but that term is a little too reminiscent of key parties) sites. I’ve gotta say–as a whole, they’re a real disappointment. As far as I can figure, these are the top three for Canadians:

The sites commit a variety of sins, most of which reek of circa-2001 websites:

  • They’re incredibly hokey looking.
  • You can’t see complete listings until you pay.
  • The usability and navigation is unilaterally awful.
  • It’s painful to find the information you’re looking for. None of them have the basic search functionality you’d expect. They can’t, as far as I can tell, complete a query like ’show me all the properties in city X wanting to exchange with properties in city Y‘.
  • Of course, there are no RSS feeds.
  • The pricing is shockingly high. To be listed on HomeLink’s site and in their dead tree catalog (heh), it costs CAN $169! That would buy me 5 Flickr pro accounts, a year of a basic Base Camp account or a whole schwack of eBay transactions.

Clearly none of this stops them from running a successful home exchange business. Still, I’m pretty dismayed by my options. I guess their target demographics are seniors and families–hardly groups reknowned for demanding innovation in online services.

Craigslist has a home exchange service which is free (here are Vancouver’s listings), but it’s pretty labour intensive (the site doesn’t do much work for me).

Couldn’t some screen-scraping, RSS-enabled, garage-living, rounded-corner using Web 2.0 startup build a better home exchange site? I’ll be customer number one.

UPDATE: We recently paid US $60 and joined HomeExchange.com. The registration and profile-building steps were adequate, but the search functionality is truly awful. That’s the most important part!

You can execute an advanced search. So, despite the fact that I want ‘a home exchange for 2 people who want to come to Canada from France in spring, 2006′, and I can do is search by country! So, I get to wade through thousands of results trying to find the 1-in-20 entries which want to come to Canada. Then I have to manually assess the number of family members and where they want to go in Canada. It’s shameful, and a massive waste of my time.

This isn’t rocket science for HomeExchange.com. Millions of websites execute a usable advanced search. They’ve already got the database–it’s merely a question of writing (or borrowing) the PHP code.

Comments: 21 Responses so far

Derek K. Miller
June 20th, 2006
11:24 am

All those Web 2.0 programmers are too poor and live in cities with astronomical housing prices, so house swapping arrangements probably aren’t on their radar.

I’m generalizing here, but hey, aren’t unresearched generalizations what blog comments are for?

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Neal
June 20th, 2006
11:28 am

Refresh me, where do you want the other house to be? And how long?

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darren
June 20th, 2006
11:39 am

Neal, in truth, I haven’t actually said. It’s all a bit loose and speculative at the moment.

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Paul
June 20th, 2006
12:17 pm

We use http://www.homeexchange.com to swap for our Vancouver condo and have had great experiences. We get more offers than we can take advantage of from all over the world.

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Anne Pottinger
June 20th, 2006
1:17 pm

What a negative, narrow in perspective assessment!.

I take it you didn’t check out ExchangeHomes.com.

This company has been continually in business since 1986 and on the web since 1996. Visitors can see ALL the listings, in full detail, including photographs, before making any commitment to join. Membership for one full year is just $39.00. There is also a big price break for anyone interested in joining for 3 years

I strongly caution anyone against seeking a home exchange via a “free” site. You should remember that free all too often equates with casual and I’ve heard of many genuine home exchangers who have been badly let down at the very last minute by uncommited exchange partners they located via a free site.

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darren
June 20th, 2006
2:22 pm

Anne: Thanks for that. Your pricing does sound much more reasonable than the other sites I looked at. Why the big difference in price?
Also, why do you find my assessment ‘narrow in assessment’? Because I didn’t include your site?

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James
June 20th, 2006
7:08 pm

Do you know about Geenee - http://geenee.com/ ?

Destinations are limited but they seem web 2.0 compliant.

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darren
June 20th, 2006
7:24 pm

That, James, is the shit I’m talking about. Nice one.

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Libby
June 21st, 2006
1:00 am

I found that http://www.homebase-hols.com was excellent when I did a swap from Sydney to London two years ago. The site is easy to use, charges a reasonable fee (I agree with Anne that free usually means ‘not much to offer’) and provides a very good range of descriptive listings. A sophisticated website which lacks real content is less than useful.

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Theresa
June 21st, 2006
3:55 am

You may want to check out Sabbatical Homes as well. There is no fee to search, but to list your home you pay $45 ($25 for academics). The listing stays active for 14 months, and if you are able to successfully arrange an exchange they suggest a donation of $30 to $100 “based on the value of the service rendered and the financial means of the beneficiary”.

Unfortunately, their search function does not allow you to filter properties in city X wanting to exchange with properties in city Y. I found this quite frustrating too, when I was exploring a home exchange for my stay in Toronto.

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Libby
June 23rd, 2006
1:21 am

Another point - the http://www.homebase-hols.com site that I used for my swap to London does have a number of search options including searches by people who want to come to your town/city. I found that this was a good way to start to look for possible matches. However I found that the majority of people are not looking specifically for one city so such a limited search misses out all those who haven’t listed your city as a destination but could well be interested in your offer. Indeed, the members I exchanged with in London hadn’t even listed Australia as a possible destination, let alone Sydney! This couple were ‘open to offers’ and responded positively when I contacted them with my offer. I guess my point is to not get so hung up on state of the art technology that you overlook the fact that the most successful home exchangers know they are more likely to find a good swap the more flexible they are.

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Tis
July 7th, 2006
11:06 pm

I some a search recently to find the best home exchange site, the one with the most NY listings:

330+ Home-Exchange
253 Homelink
173 HomeForExchange
145 House Exchange International
108 INTERVAC
107 DIGSVILLE
51 Holiday Home Exchange
34 HomeInvite
30 U-Exchange
30 Global-Home-Exchange
28 ExchangeHomes
27 geenee
25 Home-Base-Holidays
25 International-Home-Exchange-network

I’m using geenee and am impressed so far.

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LizS
July 9th, 2006
6:51 am

I did a home swap years ago (very successful). I started looking again this week and was gobsmacked by the number of home exchange sites now. It must still be a small business so how come so many people think they can make something out of it? My guess is that most probably won’t last too long (free membership always seems like desperation). One thing I did find out is that it is impossible to compare the numbers of listings on sites as some look like they probably keep old ones up almost indefinitely. I’d go for a site that may not have so many listings but where you can plainly see how long ago each person listed their home. I’d also look for a phone number with something like home exchange as you may need to talk to someone at the agency if you have problems.

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Nicolas
August 23rd, 2006
2:23 am

I basically felt exactly like you and being a programmer/web guy who loves open-source, I have now developed a FREE home exchange site called http://www.itamos.com in my spare time.

What’s web 2.0 about it is that it is the first free home exchange site with a strong community and social networking aspect (a la Friendster or My Space…) Basically, you list your apartment / home, tell other members where you would like to go for your next exchange, invite your trusted friends, who invite their
friends, etc… and basically end up with a lot of great houses/appartment from friends of friends around the world or the country that you can exchange for free for your next vacations.

This type of home-exchange site exists already but none are free and none use the friend-of a friend concept: you have to exchange with perfect strangers which some people feel pretty uncomfortable with.

Have a look and if you like it , pass it on to your trusted friends and family members: the more trusted friends you pass this site on to, the less you will need to contact people you don’t know to make great
exchanges around the world.

The site is almost done functionnaly now (some of the content is missing though) but still in beta. I am hoping to do the full-scale launch sometimes soon… feel free to let me know of any suggestions/feedback you guys may have until then!

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Nicole
September 17th, 2006
10:00 pm

I agree wth you about most exchange sites’ functionality. However, HomeExchange.com _does_ have a search feature where you can “complete a query like ’show me all the properties in city X wanting to exchange with properties in city Y‘.” My blog lists lots of tips for finding and arranging the best exchange: http://homeexchanger.blogspot.com/ It’s totally non-commercial (I make no $$ from it).

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Beth
October 9th, 2006
11:36 pm

If you check most of the established home exchange sites you will find a good number of ways to limit search results (often called something like Advanced Search) - many with more ways of limiting and viewing search results than homeexchange.com has. If you get beyond the hype on some sites, you find that the functionality is actually very good!

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aussie -european swap wanted!
January 31st, 2007
8:33 pm

Hi There.

We have just joined up HomeExchange (as of last night, but wont add the listing for a day or two. We figured we might blog our adventures as well, including the details of Our House in Brisbane. We havent put our names on the blog you have to email us for that! - but our listing on Home exchange will have all the details.
Check out our link if you want to a preview.
Cheers
tan

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Ursula Godwin Niesmann
February 11th, 2007
8:41 am

Darren, I agree. At first glance, it is not always obvious how to use best the search functions of the various home exchange sites. However, most have some kind of search features that lead you to the desired results eventually. In general, home exchangers are very flexible and adaptable people. Most are probably more interested in travel than technical things. So they accept “the conditions” of their home exchange services. I know a few software developers who do home swapping, but it is their wives who organize the swaps…
Being avid home exchangers ourselves, we very recently launched our own home exchange network - JewettStreet.com. We received an excellent review from industry experts, Know Your Trade (for more details go to http://www.jewettstreet.com). Among other things, they especially pointed out our outstanding search features.
By the way, my husband is an engineer.

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Ilya
March 27th, 2007
12:05 pm

You can also check http://friendlytravelers.com. The web site looks like Web 2.0, RSS-enabled and round cornered :) And it is definitely garage-living.

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Benoit Sarton
May 6th, 2007
8:47 am

I’d like a website specialized on short exchanges ( 2-7 days ), and low cost airlines opportunities. Example : I’m not far from Nimes, Montpellier and Marseille (France) ; so I’d like a direct search to houses around Luton, East Mids, Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin or Stockholm (where I can fly to for as little as 1 euro sometimes)

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Athena Rickby
January 28th, 2008
10:15 am

I’m a veteran home exchanger of 25 years with 40+ successful home exchanges under my belt.

I’ve recently written an e-book “Home Exchange Academy”, with the intention of passing on my family’s wealth of experience. I hope I can help swappers just embarking upon choosing their club, as well as more seasoned members who may not be getting as much as they should out of their listings.

My book is completely impartial - I don’t recommend any club over another. However, I do guide readers in exactly how to assess all those that are out there.

Please visit
Athena

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