I am wondering if anyone has successfully done a house exchange from the Los Angeles area to Italy. We have a very nice large home with a pool and I need a good company recommendation to handle the exchange. There seem to be many out there. I would love to work with a good company from the start.
Also what would you recommend as a good place as a base? What city or town?
We use 2 that I'm very happy with. Homelink-USA.org has been around since way before the Internet, 60+ years. Homeforexchange is our other company that we use. People on homelink are very kind, dedicated, and are in it for the whole experience. People on homeforexchange may be in it to briefly try home exchanging-- you can sign up for as little as 3 months. Neither company has a lot of listings for Italy as compared to listings for the UK and Northern Europe. Italians have been late in embracing home exchanging-- they vacation in a different way. Two years ago we finally had our first Italian exchange. The exchange homes tend to be primary residences/apartments in the city or their coastal second home.
I can recommend Home Exchange. You can find them at https://homeexchange.com/en/
When it comes to the city to use as a base, I would select Florence or Rome. Florence is my personal favorite (I have lived there) but Rome is a good spot too.
We have used Homelink, HomeExchange, and Intervac. They all work in pretty much the same way. However, your posting suggests that you are laboring under a serious misapprehension. None of them "handle" the exchange. They merely list your offering and give you access to other people's contact information. We have found it works best for us to survey the companies' listings, which you can do, minus the contact info. Then we sign up with the one that seems to offer the best opportunities for our target area.
One of the previous posters mentioned the difficulty of landing an exchange in Italy. We never managed to do so. Many times we had what we thought were possibilities; but they ultimately became offers to rent someone's second home or income property. We gave up on trying to secure an exchange in Italy. Arranging an exchange is much easier now than when you had to do it by letter, but I still resent people wasting my time with phony come-ons. We have rented a couple of times, but only from people who were straight-forward at the outset about what they were offering.
One other thing to be careful about, and that is location. We've gotten offers, for example, to exchange with a property on an island. We are not much into sitting around when we take on the expense and time investment for a trip to Europe. Being based where you have to spend 20 or 30 minutes just to get to a road that leads to somewhere we want to go would make us really unhappy.
I finally took the plunge and listed on HomeExchange.com in June. I didn't get any positive responses to my inquiries. I did get inquiries from several people including one or two in Italy, that came to nothing and I had decided to forget about the whole idea. Then just this week, on Monday, I got an inquiry from a woman in Paris and within 3 days we agreed on a swap for 2.5 weeks in April. So I guess I'll stick with it for another year and see what happens. I'm not the best case because there are a lot of offers here in Israel that I'm "competing" with.
It cost $120 for a year. You can browse the listings all you want. If you see some that are interesting, get a 2-week free trial which lets you contact them. I haven't used any of the other companies. This one seems to be very trustworthy. You can see how many exchanges the owner has done in the past, read some reviews from people who've stayed in the property. As with the other companies above, this site is basically a match-maker. There is online chat available if you have questions. They've been very helpful when I've needed it. . . sometimes I've found it a little tricky to navigate the site.
Wow, seems like it is difficult to get an exchange to Italy. Thanks everyone for the info.
Lisa, take comfort from the fact that there's a whole lot more of Europe out there. Be open to it. Also, if you want to do a lot of sightseeing, Italy's pretty spread out. I can see spending 2 weeks in one place in several European cities, but not so much in Italy.
