While the typical house swapper might be a bit more established in their life and lodging, many of us won’t stay in the same home forever. And once you’ve planned a move you need to figure out what to do with your home exchange listings. This isn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be.
I have yet to find a home exchange website that allows users to set their home as unavailable forever, starting at a date in the future. On most networks you have two options:
- Disable your listing entirely. This should hide your home from any searches.
- Set your calendar to unavailable going as far out into the future as you want (manually)
The problem here is the time between your decision to move, and the actual move. Let’s say you figure out that you are moving homes on February 1. And you want to continue doing home exchanges until maybe January 15 (at which point your house might become a chaos of boxes). There isn’t an easy way to indicate this on any of the home exchange networks I’ve looked at. Your best bet is to set your calendar as unavailable from Jan 15 through the end of the year. Or even further out. That will eliminate most requests for dates after your move.
But we all know that lots of people on home exchange networks don’t check date availability before sending requests. So this is a less than perfect solution. You’ll still get some requests, and in order to keep your response rate up you’ll need to reject them all.
Once January 15 rolls around you should definitely disable your home exchange listings. This will save you the need to respond to requests and it will also save other people time, who might otherwise be browsing your home and sending you requests. Hopefully you can get your new home set up quickly so that you can reactivate your listings with the new place and get back to swapping.
