Geenee Home Exchange Network Review

Review date: September 2020

geenee.com

Founded in 2006

Free

Owned by a husband (Australian) and wife (Canadian) team based in the UK

English and French

17,800 listings (6000 active)

Listings by continent:

• Africa: 336
• Asia: 235
• North America: 3,727
• Europe: 11,900
• Australia: 1,554
• South America: 171

Although this appears to be one of the largest home swap networks, many of these listings are from inactive members. The problem is the members who join free networks and then never delete their listing, but stop using it at some point. Some large percentage of these 17,800 listings are almost certainly inactive. In truth I’ve never met anyone who uses this network so it’s a bit of a mystery. It’s also odd that their number of advertised listings has not changed in years.

I did reach out to Geenee to ask about ways to filter out inactive members and they responded that they only de-activate people whose email is bouncing. But accounts that are not being used are left active. Geenee does have an algorithm to sort search results level of activity. This means you should always reach out to the matches on the first few pages of results.

Although the Geenee team was very responsive to my questions, and explained their sort system in quite a bit of detail, I’m still at a loss to calculate what percentage of the membership of Geenee is actually active. They don’t have a way to know this because once Geenee members connect, the swap discussions move offline (via email or phone). My best guess is that it’s similar to my calculation for GuesttoGuest back when that network was also free. For G2G I estimated about 1/3 of the members were active, based on a somewhat scientific sample. This would put the active membership count for Geenee around 6000. This might be overly generous as I don’t see anyone on the network with their calendar of availability filled in, even in the first listings returned during a search.

Searching: The search functionality is very basic. You can search by continent, and select whether or not you want to display rentals with the home exchanges, and you can specify dates and number of people the home must sleep. That’s pretty much it, there are no further filters. They do also have a text based search box powered by Google which returns listings with your keywords.

Listings: Results are displayed in a usable format with details on the property clear when you select one to view.

This site offers the following variations on house swapping:

• simultaneous or non-simultaneous house swap – this is the traditional model where two parties swap houses for an agreed upon set of dates. Non-simultaneous works best with second homes, but is also useful for people going on vacation and leaving their home empty. In this case each party picks different dates for the swap.
• vacation rental – the usual rental system applies here, and owners collect payment via this site.

Site design: Somewhat dated in the look and feel. The team tells me they are working on updating the website but it’s slow going (free network = no paid staff).

Privacy and security: Homes on this network are visible to anyone, even without creating an account. Only the home location is not visible.

If you’re trying to figure out which Home Exchange network to join, check out my reviews of all the major house swap networks.