Another user may have chosen not to receive messages from you if your message to this person has not been added to your conversations list.

On HomeSwapper, members have the option to stop receiving messages from other members if they wish to (you will see this option when reading a message from someone else, above the message itself on the right).

In future, if a member decides to ‘block’ another member, their homes will not appear in that person’s search results anymore.

Over 90% of Swappers are subscribed to HomeSwapper through their landlord. The landlord pays HomeSwapper an annual fee which is not dependant on how many users they have, so HomeSwapper earns exactly the same, whether the landlord has 1 user or 1001 users. The landlord has control over which of their tenants can or cannot use the service that they pay for.

The reason more landlords partner with HomeSwapper than any other service is because we give their tenants the best possible chance of finding a swap. Doing anything other than discouraging time wasters would be counter-productive to this.

We are also in the process of making a number of changes to the website to deter time wasters and encourage everyone to get the most out HomeSwapper. These enhancements all come directly from our members’ feedback and ideas.

Useful links:

We’re sorry that you’ve had a bad experience with another swapper on our system.

It’s possible to block any swapper from contacting you again, through our messaging function. Simply go to your messages and open the conversation from the swapper you’d like to block. You should then see the option to ‘Block user’, just above the message.

If they do try and contact you again, their message won’t be delivered to you.

Our messaging facility is private and secure, but if you have chosen to put either your phone number, personal email address or social media profile to another user, this is entirely your decision and we can’t accept responsibility for this.

To clear your cache or cookies you’ll need to:

– Find out what browser you’re using. You can do this by clicking here: https://whatbrowser.org
– Once you know your browser, Google ‘clear cache’ followed by your browser name. For example, if you are using Internet Explorer, type: ‘clear cache – Internet Explorer’
– Then follow the instructions given

Unfortunately there are some tenants who do not regularly log into their HomeSwapper account which we understand can be quite frustrating for active users.

We have made recent changes to the way “time waster” accounts are treated on HomeSwapper based on feedback received.

When you search, you have the option of filtering people out who haven’t logged in recently. You can choose, for example, to only view adverts of tenants who have logged in over the last week.

We have also introduced a platinum, gold, silver and bronze badge system on people’s adverts. These have been brought in as a further way of identifying those who are serious about swapping and highlighting potential time wasters (who will not have potentially earned one of these badges).

Useful links:

If you’re having an problems with the site, you might need to take a screenshot of your computer screen to show us the issue. You can do this by:

• Have your screen open, press and hold down the ‘Alt’ key on your keyboard
• With ‘Alt’ held down, press ‘Print Screen (PrntScrn)’
• If you then open Microsoft Paint (or Word if you prefer and have it installed), just click ‘paste’ and it should copy this into here as an image / Word document
• You can then send it as an attachment to your email
  

If you’re using a mobile phone, you can usually take a screenshot by holding the home button and the sleep button at the same ti

If you click ‘Unsubscribe’ at the bottom of the last email you received from us, it will take you off the mailing list and you won’t be sent these emails in future.

HomeSwapper has a dedicated UK-based support and development team to provide tenants and housing providers with the highest levels of support, whilst continuing to develop and improve the software to provide you with the platform where you are most likely to complete your mutual exchange.

As an IT software company we have no way of proving if an advert or description is fraudulent. 

At HomeSwapper we only provide the tool to allow tenants to advertise their homes. Once a tenant has registered their account this will need approval from the property landlord to make sure that the details that the tenant has added to their home advert are correct against the property.

Therefore, it is the landlord’s responsibility to take any further action with the tenant against their advert if this is found to be fraudulent.

If you wish to bring this to the attention of the landlord, you can find the name of the landlord on the advert in question on the section ‘About this home’.

We’re sorry to hear you do not wish to have your contact details and property details included in our HomeSwapper lists service. HomeSwapper lists are used by a large number of landlords to ensure that available homes are advertised to those people who do not have access to the internet. Having your property advert included within lists can increase your chances of finding a swap.

If you would still like to unsubscribe from these lists, please send an email to the Help Desk at tenants@homeswapper.co.uk and include the following information:

• Full Name
• Date of birth
• Address including postcode

This is required to ensure we match your details 100% to remove you from the list.

We are very sorry to hear you are dissatisfied with the service you have received from HomeSwapper. A formal complaint would need to be submitted in writing to:

HomeSwapper (HPL Complaints Department)
2nd Floor
Teme House
Whittington Hall
Whittington Road
Worcestershire
WR5 2RY

Upon receiving your correspondence, your complaint will be investigated in full by one of our team members.

Unfortunately some swappers do not respond to all of their messages. We have taken action to try to persuade everyone to reply, even if it’s only to say ‘no thank you’. Now if you have any messages that haven’t been replied to, access to your account will be restricted.

You can see when a message has been read by the other swapper, as the word ‘seen’ will appear underneath your message in the chat window.

It is also worth checking the last time that the other tenant logged in. This is shown on their home advert and also next to the profile name within a message conversation.

We also allow you to narrow your search to those who have only recently logged in. On the ‘Find a match’ page, you will see this setting on the left hand side at the bottom.

Useful links:

If you’ve forgotten your password, don’t worry it’s really easy to reset it. There are two options:

1. When you go to the login page of HomeSwapper, underneath the boxes for username and password, you’ll see a prompt that says, ‘Forgot your password?’. By clicking on this you’ll be taken through the steps to reset your password using the email address you used to setup your HomeSwapper account.

2. If you signed up using a username, rather than an email address then you’ll need to get in touch with our Help Desk at tenants@homeswapper.co.uk. They will reset your password for you and send you the new details. You’ll need to login in once you have them and change the password to something more personal to you. You can do this by going to ‘My details’ and then ‘My account’ in the menus on your Dashboard.

For more information on resetting your password, you can read our helpful how to guide.

Useful links:

We brought in a new rule that encourages swappers to always reply to each other, even if it’s only to say ‘no thank you’. Now, if you have any messages that haven’t been replied to, access to your account will be restricted.

Any messages you need to reply to are now highlighted in red. Once you’ve replied to these you will have full access to your account again. If it seems like you do not have any unread (red) messages, you may need to check your deleted messages, restore them and reply to any you haven’t replied to.

You only need to reply once to an original message in a conversation. The person who sends the message does NOT then have to respond again. (Otherwise it would be never ending!) We have made these changes to accounts with messages which have not been replied to, based on feedback from many of our users to deal with timewasters. The decision was taken that all accounts with any unanswered messages would fall into this category.

Useful links:

When you register to HomeSwapper and upload your advert to the site, we do not show your house or flat number, for security reasons.

We also ask that if you upload a photo of the front of your property, the number is not visible for the same reason (we also check all photos and will remove these, if they are added).

However, on your advert, the street name will be visible, as well as the postcode. This has always been the case on HomeSwapper.

We have Google Street view on HomeSwapper, so that when you’re looking at an advert, you can view the street and surrounding area from the street point-of-view. It can sometimes be possible for a person to work out which of the properties is yours, using Street-View against any photos you may have added of the exterior of your property. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about this, other than to actually remove Google Street View itself.

HomeSwapper takes privacy and security very seriously, which is why we only share contact details if you have asked us to do so, and also why we moderate photos to make sure no children and house or flat numbers are visible. However, I’m afraid we cannot be accountable for issues like this.

It may be worth raising this with your landlord, as they may be able to look into it further. If you are worried about this tenant turning up again, it may even be worth raising this as a police matter.

We do advertise on HomeSwapper, but any revenue from this is put straight back into the service which allows us to keep developing it and making it better.

We will never show any adverts that take up the full screen or block your view of any HomeSwapper content.

We’ve tried to keep advertising to a minimum, and we work very closely and regularly with our ad providers to make sure that anything we show is appropriate and doesn’t feature anything that could negatively affect tenants, i.e. credit organisations, pay day loans, betting etc. All of these adverts carry a tag and we block these particular tags, however very occasionally these companies tag their adverts deliberately to get through our block. We deal with these issues as soon as they come up and remove these adverts from our site within a short time of them being reported.