Your Home for Mine Review

Review date: April 2014

yourhomeformine.com

yourhomeformine.com

Founded in 2009

$69.96/year (join now and the second year is free)

Owned by two Kiwis living in Australia

English only

4076 listings

Listings by continent:

• Africa: 40
• Asia: 93
• North America: 351
• Europe: 900
• Pacific: 2676
• South America: 15

Searching: There is no search by map functionality. And the geography searches require you to select from drop down menus of continent or country and then type in a keyword to narrow it down further. This does ensure you only get results for the city of interest in the proper country but is not as sophisticated as the geography searches on many other sites. They do have some options to narrow the search down further by features of the property. It is possible to further narrow down your search to see only people interested in visiting your city though this returns both people specifically looking for your city and those open to going anywhere with no way to distinguish in your search.

Listings: Within the individual listings in the search result basic information is displayed in a readable format. The map display does not provide a pin to show where the property is exactly and so you end up just seeing a rather large region within which it could be found anywhere. This is not a particularly helpful feature.

This site offers the following variations on house swapping:

• simultaneous or non-simultaneous house swap – this is the traditional model where two parties swap houses for an agreed upon set of dates. Non-simultaneous works best with second homes, but is also useful for people going on vacation and leaving their home empty. In this case each party picks different dates for the swap.

Site design: There are a lot of self-referencing ads that pop up around the site encouraging you to join, but presumably those go away once you pay for membership. Otherwise the site is reasonably easy to use.

Additional features: The site includes the ability to leave reviews. It does not appear to have email functionality, instead members fill out a form to send an enquiry to listings they like, and the response will be directly to their personal email account. Overall the site is among the most hands off in the swap business with no contract, forums, insurance or other features.