ExchangeMouse is proud to announce the official release of version 1 of our website. This site is an excellent resource for people new to home exchange who are trying to decide which home swap network to join. It’s also a great tool for experienced home exchangers who want a simpler and more functional search to find matches for future travels within the networks they have joined. It’s possible to search across all 60+ networks included in ExchangeMouse or narrow down the search to just the network(s) of interest to you.
I spent some time this past week helping a friend in Spain try out ExchangeMouse. She had done one home exchange in the past, through the Intervac network. It went very well, but when she looked on that site for homes in her next destination, Morocco, she didn’t find anything. So she assumed she would be spending this summer’s trip in hotels. I told her that I’d looked at Morocco briefly in the past and been surprised to see a good number of homes listed, though I couldn’t remember which home swap site had the listings. So I suggested that ExchangeMouse might be particularly useful for her.
At the bottom of the screen on every search result page you can see the overall distribution of listings by home exchange site
We sat down together one evening and I showed her how to use the ExchangeMouse site. We used my account (it’s free to create an account) to search for homes listed in Morocco, just to see overall what the options are. Over 1000 homes came up. And we were quickly able to see that the majority of the listings are on two sites: GuestToGuest and Home for Home.
We then filtered down to only see those homes whose owners indicated they were interested in coming to my current location (her town in Spain). This brought us down 166 listings, still predominantly on the same two home exchange networks.
We further filtered down to homes that could accommodate at least 4 people, since she and her husband have two kids. That only eliminated a handful of listings. We played around with a few other filters but there wasn’t anything else important to her. So we started looking at the individual listings.
There are some pretty spectacular looking homes listed for swap in Morocco
There are some very nice homes available for exchange in Morocco! And many appear to be vacation homes, increasing the likelihood that they are available for summer travel dates. Of course my friend still needs to join the home exchange sites that have homes of interest to her, contact the people with the listings, and hope to find a suitable exchange. None of this is guaranteed, but with ExchangeMouse we were able to quickly narrow in on her best options for finding this swap.
This small villa near Tangiers looks lovely
We also talked about one of the sites that she was considering joining and the fact that we both found their user interface rather difficult and unsophisticated. This led to a quick lesson on how she could join that site, add it to her account on ExchangeMouse and then use the much cleaner search interface on ExchangeMouse to help find good matches on the exchange site.
Link your personal listings on home exchange networks
Search only on “my sites”: the sites that you’ve linked to your ExchangeMouse account
Matches can be saved in ExchangeMouse for future followup or marked as unsuitable, and all results of ExchangeMouse searches link directly to their original listings on the home exchange networks so it’s easy to make contact with other members on the appropriate site.
Give ExchangeMouse a try and send along any feedback or questions.