I recently received an email from a reader asking a variation of a very common question. Here’s the question along with my response.
Dear ShareTraveler: We’ve discovered recently your great site about home swapping and we were wondering if you could advise the best site for us. We own a flat in the center of Paris, France and we’d like to come to NYC in August, what would be to best website to register to find the most NYC people willing to swap their home ? Thank you for your help & kudos for your website.
Dear Reader: I’m glad you found my website. If you really just have one swap in mind, this is challenging because it’s already getting close to the summer so it might be a little late to find an exchange for August, but many people do wait to make their plans so it is certainly possible.
I’d suggest you look through my table of all the home exchange sites here.
Things you should look for:
- One of the larger sites, you can sort by number of listings
- Sites that cover both europe and the U.S.: you can click on the links to see my reviews of all the large sites and in there I display the number of listings by region of the world wherever it was possible to find this.
I would select the top 3-5 home exchange networks that meet these criteria and then run searches to test out how many homes you can find that match exactly what you want: people who are interested in visiting Paris from New York. This is not a requirement as some people who don’t specify where they want to go will still be interested in Paris, but at least you can see if there are people currently looking to go to Paris from New York to get a sense of how easy it might be to find a match. Most sites allow you to do searches without becoming a member, to test it out.
With all that said, you probably want to test out:
- HomeExchange.com
- GuestToGuest
- HomeLink
- Intervac
- LoveHomeSwap
And maybe some of the other large general sites. I am not super familiar with all of them, nor have I ever searched for a Paris-New York swap, so it is best if you do some testing on your own to pick the best one(s) for your needs. You can also read my reviews (linked to on my spreadsheet) to learn about other details of these sites that might be important to finding one that best meets your needs.
Also, given your very specific requirement and short time frame, you might want to consider signing up for more than one site to increase your chances of finding a match.
Lastly, you could try out ExchangeMouse to see if it helps you find the best site to join. This would be a good shortcut to running test searches on each site separately and will allow you to try them all out at once. It is still in beta release but we would welcome more testers and I think it would help you quickly find the best match for your needs. You can read about it here.
Hope that helps!