My table of home exchange networks is probably the most popular item on this website. Every time I go in there I see multiple people using it. This is exciting because I thought something like this was needed and I’m really glad people are finding it useful! But it also increases the pressure on me to keep it up to date.
I just did a thorough review of each home exchange network to make sure everything was correct. I updated member counts and pricing, and removed the ones that have disappeared or were acquired. I was also inspired to update my reviews on the networks that have changed significantly since my last review. So stay tuned for the publication of new reviews over the next month.
Home exchange industry trends
In terms of major home exchange industry trends, it’s clear from a look at the membership numbers that overall the trend is towards growth of home exchange networks. And most of this growth was among the biggest networks: Guest to Guest, Home Exchange.com, and Home for Home had the largest overall increase in numbers. LoveHomeSwap and MyTwinPlace also showed decent growth, but I have to call out these latter two for apparently deceptive advertising on membership numbers and I’m only counting their growth based on my actual listing counts rather than their greatly inflated membership claims.
Some of the smaller networks did increase in membership, a number of them also decreased in size. Although these changes are actually quite significant as a percentage of the total membership in these sites, they don’t represent a very big portion of home exchange members overall. I think the trend is really towards a few major players dominating the home exchange market. For me that’s not a bad thing because numbers are critical to finding the home exchange that you want: more members in the network you use = more opportunities to find a swap. A new network could come on the scene with some great innovation and overtake the existing home exchange giants, but I expect to see more and more of the really small ones close down or be acquired in the coming years.
The exception here are small home exchange networks that target specific niche populations. For instance, if you just want to swap within the UK, the small site dedicated to this has a really good membership size for its geographic focus and it might be the best network for you to join. Similarly if you need accessible lodging, or you have a luxury second home, you may want to only exchange with people in the same situation. Small sites focusing on specific groups of people will continue to fill needs and are likely to stick around and continue to grow.
Counting listings: why is it so difficult?
Ever since I created this spreadsheet I have struggled with how to present the number of members who belong to each home exchange network. For many sites there’s no issue, but a few claim membership that is significantly higher than the number of listings I can find on their site. Also there are some sites that don’t make it easy to figure out how many listings they have. Whether or not this is intended as deceptive marketing, I really don’t like this practice because I think numbers are a big factor in which site people might want to join.
I ended up changing my spreadsheet a bit: there is still a column labeled “Listings” with my best estimate of the actual total number of listings, which I have attempted to validate with real counts. For those sites that claim dramatically higher membership than I can find counting listings I now have a column “Listings claimed.” I only fill that in when there is a big discrepancy. I may, in fact, be wrong about my counts, but I believe that if I can only find 2000 listings on a site, it’s not likely they really have 10,000 available to everyone else. I also think this misleading information might be a factor in whether people want to join a network, which is why I decided to display it.
I do encourage the home exchange networks to contact me if anything in my spreadsheet is inaccurate and I’m happy to update it!
Here’s the link to the table. I’m also happy to report that my spreadsheets are now integrated into pages in my website, no more sending people out to google to use them!
