Updating membership counts for Home Exchange networks

I spent a lot of time in July updating my membership counts (and other details) for all the existing home exchange networks. You can find this information in my spreadsheet here.  I put the most effort into validating the accuracy of counts for networks that have >5000 members. Most people doing home exchange factor the size of the network into their decision about which one to join, and for a lot of reasons bigger is generally better. So I think it’s important to have accurate counts of listings to compare across networks.

The smaller networks are useful for folks with very specific home swap needs. For instance, if you live in the Netherlands and only want to exchange within that country. Or if you are part of the Waldorf community and want to swap with other members. But people should expect far fewer swap options in those targeted networks. You’re probably not joining those groups for the membership size.

HomeExchange.com listings map

I’m still missing updated listing count information for the following home exchange networks:

• Stay4Free
• U-Exchange
• IHEN
• Bovile
• IWB
• Waldorf Home Exchange
• Jewish Swap

If anyone who works for or is a member in these networks can to provide me total counts of listings I’ll be happy to update my spreadsheet.

There are some home swap networks that list misleading information about their membership size. The number of businesses doing this has dropped dramatically this past year, perhaps not coincidentally right after the Love Home Swap scandal.  I still have a column indicating the claimed membership for those networks where it’s far from my actual count. There are currently only two making ridiculous claims that don’t line up with counts: Geenee and Trampolinn. I also use that column to indicate where there is a claim that I can’t verify that seems unlikely.

A note about free membership sites. There is no incentive to de-activate a membership if you’re not paying for it. And so I’ve started also using the “claimed listings” column to indicate total listings as distinct from active listings for those networks. Currently Guest to Guest is the only network on which I think this is possible to count relatively accurately. I don’t do this to make them look bad, in fact I respect that Guest to Guest makes this count possible. But I don’t want prospective members to think there are 300k+ listings that are active on Guest to Guest when the reality is quite a bit smaller. When I’m able to do this for other free networks I will update the claimed and counted listing columns similarly.