Last time Sarah Jayne introduced us to her smart way to organise all of the potential swaps and multiswaps that she matched with on HomeSwapper. She’d devised a spreadsheet that listed the pros and cons of each potential home. We were lucky enough to talk again to Sarah Jayne about how she makes a swap smooth sailing.
HomeSwapper is the leading platform for mutual exchanges in the UK, it has the most homes from all across the country, finding a swap can take a lot of time and dedication. In fact, some of you busy Swappers visit the site over 200 times a year! Sarah Jayne explained how what you put into finding a swap is what you get out of it.
Sarah-Jayne: “Oh, definitely. You have to be committed to it. You can’t just put it there and expect people just to find you and you really have to put in the work and you have to be polite and kind and responsive to everybody. And, yeah, it is like a part-time job. I found it a big, big job and I know a lot of people struggle with it a lot. If you’re on the Facebook groups you can see people are just at their wits’ end. They really, really struggle with it and you do get a lot of, people call them time-wasters but I suppose it’s because they’re just not interested in your property.
It’s such a big job that you have to decide who you put your efforts in because if you put your efforts into everybody it would be even a bigger job. There’s also common courtesy and lacking the common courtesy could make the whole thing a bit of a nightmare.”
In Sarah-Jayne’s spreadsheet she included a little part about noting when sometimes the communication with another Swapper feels a little off. Changing homes isn’t a small task and takes a lot of communication and trust so it’s important to listen to your intuition and invest in the swaps that feel right.
Sarah-Jayne: That comes after a while of being involved in the whole thing. You recognise as soon as somebody says a certain question, or they act in a certain way. When I first started, I would pursue it because I thought I really liked the property. I’d really want to push it through, but then you always came to a dead end.
Sometimes, I’ve had good conversations with people that I haven’t ended up really wanting a swap with but because you feel like you’re on the same level, it’s somebody to talk to about the whole situation with. So, there’s been a couple of people where we keep checking in and going, ‘how’s it going? And duh duh duh duh duh’
In other circumstances you learn that if somebody asks you for the location twice then they’re out because they haven’t really looked at your listing. I know it sounds harsh, but I think because there’s so many things for you to look at you have to kind of just go, ‘okay, bite the bullet, I’m moving on’. I think you get a real inkling for how interested in the swap or your property somebody is very quickly, and I think very quickly you need to know when to move on from somebody.”
The HomeSwapper Customer Support team are always on hand to give advice and tips on how to get the most from HomeSwapper. They deal with Swappers every day and have a unique insight and view on the thousands of successful swaps that take place on HomeSwapper.
