I’ve finished an update of my home swap spreadsheet. This is a complete list of all home exchange networks, with information on size of network, specialty, membership price, and other features. 19 networks closed down during the pandemic. And only 3 new networks opened. The past two years have been a time of consolidation. This leaves only 39 active home exchange networks right now.
Summary of the top networks
Only 11 home swap networks have more than 2000 listings (with a few of those being nearly completely inactive but never deleting listings, making it hard for me to make an accurate count). If you are looking for a network with more than 5000 listings and an active membership I think you have only three choices:
HomeExchange – by far the largest network, and the only large network offering a points swap option
People Like Us – the network with the biggest growth over the past few years. PLU uses “globes” instead of points.
HomeLink – one of the two oldest home swap networks
If you are willing to go down to 2000 listings or more you should also consider:
Intervac – one of the two oldest home swap networks
BeLocal Exchange – focused on Latin America
SwitcHome – the only free network in this list
The others with more than 2000 listings are mostly inactive or otherwise not networks I would recommend (you can browse through my reviews to see why).
A few notes from the latest updates
Exchange Zones – I think this network is mostly inactive but there are still a few new people joining every year and I imagine still a few people using it so I didn’t remove it. Several years ago the owner told me that they remove listings after 5 years of inactivity. But that doesn’t seem to be happening since the number of listings has barely changed over the past four years. I made a random (generous) guess that there are still 3000 active members in the network. If anyone can offer me evidence of a more scientific number to use I would welcome the info.
Love Home Swap – I left the network on the spreadsheet but it will soon be integrated into HomeExchange.com
Behomm – I’ve removed any count or estimate of listings since there is no way for me to even guess at this
HomeExchange – This network greatly dropped their listing count. They now claim 100,000+ members. I always discounted their totals due to the number of non-paying, inactive listings, but this is a much bigger drop than I was estimating. HomeExchange was claiming 450,000 listings and I discounted that down to 315,000 as of my last review 3 years ago. I believe that this big drop now reflects the reality of their active, paying membership.* And I think this also reflects a purge of inactive members, which should improve the search functionality for active members.
* July 7 update: This isn’t entirely accurate. The 100,000 count appears to also include anyone who has signed up for a free trial and accessed their account in the past two years. Free trials must be converted to paid memberships in order to book exchanges. But otherwise are only bounded by the requirement of a log in to the website within the past two years.
If anyone sees inaccuracies in my spreadsheet, please let me know! I also welcome updates from representatives of the networks.
What about family home swaps? I think this might get big!
Nice!
I’m getting 10 requests a day from HE, suggesting that they’ve also cracked the nut on getting truly active members. This year, we’ll have completed over a dozen exchanges including hosting, sim and non-sim all from HE, in Sri Lanka, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, US, Canada and more.
But sadly, I wish I could trust HE more: for example, they play games with the points system (giving away too many free points and helping certain kinds of properties and hurting others), and also pushing people into the expensive Collections program. PLU seems more honest, albeit smaller and more limited.
MyPlace raised millions in funding and seems worth watching.
Not really, about the craking the nut comment, you can still send requests without having renewed your membership. You can also receive requests if you are not active and have not paid your membership. You do have to pay to finalize an exchange.
What I meant: I’m doing nothing and getting tons of great, legit exchange requests. No other network has achieved this.
While I need to send dozen requests to setup an exchange, that’s the same on any network – but HE makes it one-click to send the messages, where other websites are a big pain.
Adam, I agree about MyPlace; I’m quite interested in them. But they’re not really a home exchange network. Most of the stays through that network are for money. Though there are definitely some hospitality stays through MyPlace. I didn’t include them in my spreadsheet because I think MyPlace is not comparable to traditional home swap networks.