Home or Vacation Exchange
You probably know people who have done home exchanges, or you are familiar with the terminology, but not the details, of the process.

Home exchanging has become a very established and popular trend over the past 20 years. In simple terms, it means exchanging your vacation home and/or primary residence with other people’s homes for a short time, such as a long weekend if they are in the geographic area, or a week to a month, or long-term for up to six months or a year. Home exchanges are available everywhere in the world, and can be simul-taneous or non-simultaneous.

Home exchanging is an incredible and rewarding lifestyle experience. It allows travel almost anywhere in the world inex-pensively, with your accommodation being free, and generally the car available for usage as well. Your only costs are the airfare, tourist activities, fuel for the car, and meals. As you would be eating and driving anyway back home, the net outlay can be very minimal, especially if you are using airline points, or get cheap flight deals. So, you can easily vacation away from your vacation home, and experience new adventures, sights, scenes, people and culture.

Before you do a home exchange, it would be prudent to sign a mutual agreement with the exchange owner covering issues such as damage to the home or car.

Profile of Typical Exchanger

There is no typical exchanger. They range in age from 30 to 80-plus, from retirees with time and a desire to travel, to parents in their 30s with young children not old enough for school; from teachers with the summer off as well Christmas and Easter breaks; to parents with school age children who want to travel in the summer time; from a single or couple taking a six-month or one-year sabbatical from work with or without kids; to adults who want to experience a year or two in different parts of the world by having a continuous series of sequential exchanges, or a long-term exchange in various countries.
The common denominator is a love of travel, and the joy that comes from new experiences, and exploring diverse and different parts of the world.

Home Exchange Websites
To find companies who do online home ex-changes, you can do a Google search under “home exchanges,” “home swaps,” or “house exchanges.” Some popular ones used by Canadians, are http://www.homeexchange.com, http://www.homelink.ca, and http://www.intervac.ca. To see additional home exchange sites, refer to the website: http://www.homebuyer.ca under “useful links.”

Many home exchange sites also have additional features available for you to offer if you so wish, such as: vacation rentals, long-term exchanges, home-sitting, home-stays, and simultaneous or non-simultaneous options, etc.

You don’t need to have a recreational condo to do a home exchange, if your pri-mary home is in an attractive area. However, having two housing options available is a more attractive package for home exchan-gers who wish to select one or the other property, or possibly split the use over both properties. If you don’t have a second pro-perty, you could consider the creative option of having a family member’s property that could be used with advance scheduling, in addition to your own property, to make the exchange package more attractive.  CL

Excerpted with modification, from 101 Streetsmart Condo Buying Tips for Canadians, by Douglas Gray, published by John Wiley & Sons in May, 2006. Copyright  2006 by Douglas Gray. All rights reserved. Any reproduction of this material without the author’s advance written consent is prohibited. The author assumes no responsibility whatsoever for any information provided above, as the purpose of the column is for general information only, and not intended to provide professional advice.