We tried HomeExchange.com

One of the biggest decisions that new retirees make when they decide to live nomadically is if they want to keep their home. There are many factors that go with that decision. Selling will probably bring the least stress to retirement, but we wanted a place to return to Seattle in the summer. We actually just bought our “city” home when we decided to retire, because we knew we didn’t want to move back to the suburbs for retirement. We looked at multiple options of what to do with our townhouse when we were traveling.

1. Leave it Empty. We were a little nervous about leaving our new house to strangers, but this would bring us no money, and also we’re not very comfortable leaving it just empty for months at a time. Too much risk.
2. Let our children stay in it. We did this our first couple of years while my son’s partner was going to college. They paid us a modest rent to stay in our spare bedroom and our master bedroom was left empty for us when we wanted to return. And they made sure to take good care of the house.
3. Long term rental. This will give us a steady income but won’t let us return for the summers or holidays like we want. We would also have to rent a storage unit, move out all of our furniture, etc.
4. Short Term Rental (Airbnb). This seemed like the most stressful option. The chance of hosting someone who doesn’t take care for our place seemed much higher with the more people that stay short term, and also the potential impact on our neighbors and neighborhood. It is a bit ironic that we are afraid of Airbnb hosting when we spend so much of our year in other people’s Airbnbs.
5. Mid-Term Rentals (Furnished Finders). This is what we are mostly doing now. We rent our furnished home to traveling nurses, digital nomads, temporary gig workers, or people who are just moving to our city. We locked one bedroom with our personal stuff and are renting with short term leases that range from 2 to 9 months at time. Our son is acting as our property manager.
6. HomeExchange– Renting our our home in exchange for points that we can then use to stay at homes all over the world. We have just started trying this out so I would like to share in this blogpost how HomeExchange works and our initial experiences.

One of the biggest draws to HomeExchange is to stay in other people’s houses for free. It isn’t entirely free, because there is a $235 yearly fee to be listed on the service. I expect that fee to continue to go up every year but it still is a bargain considering the cost of Airbnb’s in some high cost of living cities. Some home owners are also now charging for a cleaning fee. We haven’t charged that because we are cleaning the house ourselves this summer.

There are 3 ways that you can do a home exchange.

1. Synchronous Reciprocal Exchange– You agree to stay in someone else’s house while they are staying in your house.
2. Asynchronous Reciprocal Exchange– You stay in someone else’s house and they stay in your house, but at a different time.
3. GuestPoints Exchange– You stay in someone else’s house in exchange for giving them GuestPoints (GP’s)

The most common way is using GP’s and that is all we have done so far. When you sign up, you get a 800 GP’s just for creating an account. Then you get 500 GP’s for paying your first yearly fee ($235). I then got some more GP’s for saying I was referred by someone. Then I did a survey and they gave me more GP’s. I had enough points to book several nights before I even had someone stay in my house. I like to think that 1 GP is worth about $1 but that conversion isn’t really accurate. Some houses are listed at 100 GP’s a night and I think if it was listed on Airbnb it would probably be around $100. But my 2 bedroom house is listed at 155 points and I might able to get $250 or $350 on Airbnb. It is difficult to find a hotel room in Seattle for under $300 a night in the summer. I have seen many other bargains on here because it really isn’t money… it is just points. People are not super greedy about how many points they can get.

We have only stayed in 1 place so far but have 2 more places booked. We spent 5 nights at a place in Brasov, Romania for 121 GP’s per night. I don’t think it was a typical HomeExchange because the home is usually rented out as an Airbnb and didn’t feel like someone’s home. It felt like an Airbnb. We also have 3 bedroom beach home in the Canadian BC Gulf Islands reserved for 6 nights this August. We are inviting our sons and their partners to join us. A sneaky way to get our kids to hang out with us. Renting a 3 bedroom waterfront Airbnb would certainly be budget blowing, so this place at around 200 GP’s a night seems like a huge bargain. We also have 4 nights booked in Dublin for about 100 GP’s a night. I started looking at hotel rooms and Airbnb’s in Dublin and was blown away. Dublin is EXPENSIVE! HomeExchange will make this stay doable.

OK, now the downsides… you need to have people stay in your beloved home in order to get more points. It is difficult to think of people sleeping in your bed… especially in our newish home. But we spend most of the year sleeping in other people’s beds so we knew we had to get over that. We have had 2 exchanges this summer already. Both groups left our house exactly how they had found it. We were really surprised about how clean they left it. They even stripped our beds so all we had to do was make our beds when we came home. We are getting requests from people all over the world. We have hosted Argentinian’s in Seattle for a soccer game and Canadian’s here to see friends. Next week we have a couple from Portland here for a wedding, followed by a family from France. It makes us happy that our house can make other people’s vacations enjoyable.

The real downside of HomeExchange is the act of reserving a house. Both parties need to agree on the exchange. About half of my requests seem to be ignored. I feel like there are a lot of homes on the platform that aren’t really available. There are also a lot of polite rejections, in addition to the people that don’t respond. I might have to request 10 different places in order to get someone to accept me. Not at all like Airbnb where I almost always get accepted. But this also allows me to politely reject requests if it doesn’t feel right for us. Usually we decline people for our schedule reasons, but it is nice to be able to research people a bit before we accept them into our home. We can check out their house, their review history and also have a message conversation with them to understand what kind of people they are. Some people even want to talk on the phone, or do a virtual tour.

Another downside is the difficulty in cancelling. When you finalize an exchange, you trade the GP’s ahead of time. If you want to cancel, you need to request to have your points returned by the host. But it is really up to their discretion. We had someone who wanted to cancel their stay with us. I didn’t have the points anymore, because I had already used them on another stay. I felt bad, but I couldn’t refund them. They decided to keep the reservation.

Overall, we have had good experiences so far with HomeExchange. We like the community aspect and the feeling that people will really take good care of our house because they are also homeowners and want their house to be cared for equally. Even if it isn’t a reciprocal exchange. HomeExchange also insures your house against any damage that might occur. But, it doesn’t bring us any cash money… so we will probably mostly continue to mainly rent out our place on Furnished Finders as a Midterm (2-9 month) rental. We will list it on HomeExchange for those weeks in between long rentals or when we are back in Seattle but want to go camping, bike touring, or hang out at our family’s beach cabin. We also have 1500 points saved up to use next year for those high cost of living cities that we don’t want to pay the high Airbnb costs. It will be a lot of fun using them. I like staying in “free” places.

If your are interested in trying it out, please use our referral code bill-7e2bc. Or use this link. It will give us GP’s but also give you more GP’s for signing up. You can create an account and get some GP’s before you have to pay the annual fee and have your listing go live.