Homework: Trading Places
Home exchanges go upscale.
June 1, 2008
In the 2006 romantic comedy The Holiday, Jude Law and Cameron Diaz have just met when he asks what she, a total stranger from Los Angeles, is doing in his sister’s cottage in Surrey, England. It was a house swap, she explains. Law is incredulous; who would ever want to move into somebody else’s house for weeks on end? Or worse, have some interloper in their home for the same length of time? These objections notwithstanding, home exchanges have become a fast-growing area of the global travel market in recent years. For some, the main appeal lies in the obvious economy of trading rather than renting. For others, it is the key to the kind of luxurious, sophisticated milieu that money cannot buy.Once little known to the public at large, home exchanges have been around on an organized basis since the 1950s, when they were used to provide affordable housing for teachers traveling on sabbatical or to seminars. Available homes were listed in catalogues and people communicated the old-fashioned way—by mail. It was a tedious, time-consuming process, and the homes were typically humble with limited hospitality.
It became a more viable practice with the advent of the Internet, which allowed the proprietor of a house-swapping service to offer a greater variety of homes to a broader market. And now, thanks in part to The Holiday, that industry’s image has been forever altered; virtually overnight, swapping homes has become chic.
"In the past year and a half our membership has doubled from 10,000 to 20,000," says Ed Kushins, president of HomeExchange.com, the largest exchange service in the United States. "Two years ago, when I went to travel conventions, no one had heard of us. But this year at the Los Angeles Travel Show everybody knew who we were and they wanted to know more about how home exchange programs work."
HomeExchange.com has experienced its greatest growth in the high-end sector, where money is no object and privacy is a prime concern. But the basic premise of exchange programs has not changed in a half-century: Anybody can take part in a home exchange as long as he or she has a place to swap. However, some geographic areas are in greater demand than others. An apartment in Paris, for instance, is likely to be a greater draw than, say, a yurt in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Swappers also have more services to choose from, including those for older travelers (SeniorsHomeExchange.com), domestic travelers (ExchangeHomesoia.com), Rotarians (RotaryHomeExchange.com), vegetarians (HappyCow.net), golfers (GolfingGlobal.com), and gays and lesbians (GayHomeTrade.com).
At HomeExchange.com, you can select a home by country, by features, by style of home, or even by property value. The website also offers a gold program (HomeExchangeGold.com), in which a membership fee of $500 per year (the standard program is $99.95 a year) grants access to properties worth anywhere from a couple million dollars to $10 million and more.
Regardless of a home’s style, size, location, or amenities, though, the most important element in a successful home exchange is communication. "It’s not like renting a house," says Kushins. "The more you can tell the other homeowner about yourself and your expectations the better. By the time you do the exchange you should no longer be strangers."
Even so, corporate lawyer Maryse Selit—who, with her husband, Howard, an investment banker, owns a penthouse overlooking New York’s Central Park, a sprawling Victorian beach house in Cape May, and a country home in Eaton, New York—was somewhat dubious about her first home exchange. "We knew people would want our homes," says Selit, "but we weren’t sure what other people could offer in return."The couple’s fears were allayed when their first trade landed them in a handsome mansion in Southern California, followed by a personal tour around the neighborhood in the homeowner’s private plane. Since then, the Selits’ home exchanges have earned them stays next to former President Nixon’s digs in St. Maarten and near the Bush family retreat in Ogunquit, Maine. "The only negative part is all the e-mail," she jokes. "We get hundreds of e-mails every week asking if our Central Park place is available."
In addition to accumulating memories—perhaps of a 15th-century castle in Scotland, a villa in Provence, or maybe a timbered chalet in the Austrian Alps—home swapping may also provide participants with a few new friends. "We’ve been to so many places that, by this point, the house and the people become more important than the country," says Russell Johnson, an architect in West Los Angeles, who, along with his wife, enjoys vacationing in homes that include pets. Johnson and his wife recall a typically friendly Labrador in Provence. The homeowners gave the couple instructions to feed the dog at six o’clock each morning—and only then. But sometimes, Johnson admits, even the best intentions can go awry. "We couldn’t bring ourselves to deny the dog anything so we just fed him all day."