Home exchange offers since last blog post: 7
Strasbourg, France
Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2 offers here)
Copenhagen, Denmark (2 offers here)
Montpellier, France
Toulouges, France
Now that you have taken the time to create your home exchange listing you are ready to start searching the database of the home exchange website you chose to join. Many of these websites have reverse searches, making it easy to pinpoint potential home exchange partners who live in a place you would like to visit AND who want to come to your area. This is the best way to find people quickly without randomly searching through hundreds of listings hoping to find someone who wants to come to your city.
Once you find homes that you are interested in you can start sending out tempting queries to potential home exchange partners in hopes that someone will "bite" and you can begin a conversation that may lead to your dream vacation.
So how do you create a query that will be informative, enticing, and attractive?
Communication is everything!
And, as with everything, first impressions are important!
Keep your initial query short and to the point. You want to share basic information that will quickly let a potential exchange partner know if an exchange might work for them as well!
Here are the 8 things you query should include:
1) The date range in which you wish to travel.
2) Your desired length of stay in their home.
3) The number of people in your group, their ages, and relationships.
4) Your location.
5) Basic information about your house.
6) Whether or not you have pets that need care or that will be absent from the house.
7) Whether or not you would like to consider a car exchange.
8) A few tempting tidbits about your home and area.
To give you an idea of how your initial query might be worded, here's my standard spiel from last summer.
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"Hello from sunny southern California!
Our family is looking for an exchange to Amsterdam any time between the dates of
June 15 - August 10.
We would like to stay in your home for 4 - 6 weeks so that we can visit family in Amsterdam and enjoy the city.
Our family includes Randall and Anita (the parents) and our 17 year old son, Skyler.
We take excellent care of our home and would care for yours as if it were our own!
Our house can comfortably sleep 5, is newly remodeled, and includes a fire pit in the backyard for relaxed summer evenings.
Our cat, Butterscotch, needs to be fed but is otherwise very independent.
Ideally we would like to swap cars.
Our home is located in a quiet
neighborhood in (our town) California about 10 minutes from some of the
best beaches in the area! We are 20 minutes from Disneyland, 30 minutes from Hollywood, and you can be in Las Vegas in 4 hours by car. Our friendly neighbors will welcome your kids to play and will probably invite you for a barbecue during your stay!
Please let us know whether or not you have interest! We look forward to hearing back from you.
Randy, Anita and Skyler"
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This short message is enough to let other parties know if the swap may work for them or not.
I usually copy and paste this message into a word document that I keep on my desktop and use it whenever I find a promising house that I think might be a good exchange for us.
So what do I do once I get a response or a query?
Well, of course, that's up to you! I find that I get a response from about 60% of all the queries I send. About 70% of our actual home exchanges have come from people who query us.
When I send out a query, some respond with a flat out "no thank you". Others have additional questions that I answer as honestly as I can. Some are a fast and enthusiastic "YES!!". That's when it starts to get very interesting! Sometimes I will get multiple "yesses" at once and I need to quickly start conversations with each of them to weed out the ones that won't work for us or that just aren't very interesting.
In the end, between those who have queried us and those we have queried, we almost always have 10 - 15 excellent choices and can choose which one is the most spectacular with which to confirm a trade.
Of the 7 queries I have in my inbox right now I can easily weed out several of them. One of them does not have an adequate bed for my 6'3" tall son. One of them wants to come for 4 weeks in August which will not work for us. Two are from Copenhagen which is not of interest to us. One is from Montpellier which although it is a beautiful city, we already did a 5 week exchange there several summers ago.
So, as of today, I'm left with a gorgeous Amsterdam house right on a canal or a fairly standard house in Strasbourg, France, a place I've ALWAYS wanted to visit. Decisions, decisions....
It will all come down to preference in these two cases. Do I want to further explore Amsterdam and visit my husband's Dutch relatives OR do I want to go to a brand new place, eat croissants, and drink French wine, and improve my language skills???
Once you have several viable choices in your inbox, that's when you need to start getting into the details with each one of your potential trading partners.
My next post will be about prioritizing your potential trades and then negotiating the details of an exchange! It isn't difficult but there are certain things that you want to make perfectly clear before agreeing to an exchange and investing in airline tickets. There are questions to be asked and details to be hammered out.
Stay tuned!
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