Has anyone ever successfully homeswapped?

dasophster

For those in social housing an honest question, has anyone ever successfully done a mutual exchange (and not with a family member or close friend) and it has all gone through and been successful? We are coming up to three years looking for a mutual exchange now and we are really starting to feel we are never going to get anywhere.

We need a certain number of bedrooms by law and we make this really clear in our ads yet we always get responses from those with less bedrooms and much smaller properties than we have currently. Also we keep getting responses from seemingly dodgy people who seem very keen to view our property but are reluctant to let us see theirs and when we find their ad on home swapping websites what they are looking for is nothing like our property, for example they are only looking for a four bedroom house in Islington that must be a council property. We have a 3 bedroom HA flat in a totally different area many miles away.

I'm really feeling now that some people on homeswap sites just like to nosy on other people's properties and have no real intention of doing a swap. We've had two cases where we have signed everything from our side but the other party have pulled out at the last minute, the first one her HA was asking her to rectify some unauthorised work done on her house before she could sign and also she decided at the last minute to fully redecorate our flat to her liking would cost too much money.

The other one everything was going nicely and then we said that our HA had put all the paperwork into the system so all they needed was some details from her side. She mistook this as we didn't want to swap with her anymore and the HA were putting our details into some mutual exchange website to swap with someone else. She then did a disappearing act and sent us a nasty email a few months later blaming us for the swap not going through and saying she was now having to privately rent in North London and had to leave her house-something we found out to be rubbish as OH kept seeing her in the supermarket in Dagenham and on a home swap website she replied to someone else who was asking about our flat so we followed the link to her ad we then found that she was lying and had been given a brand new build flat by her HA. It seems like the whole blaming us was just an excuse but why? Why not just say 'our HA has now offered us a newbuild flat so we would like to pull out of the swap?'

Our HA does have an internal housing list but the number of properties that come up on that are very few, maybe about 3 a month and only 2-3 four or five bedroom properties a year. We are also not entitled to join the council list in our area and despite our old council saying we could rejoin their list at any time they have ignored all of our letters requesting this. My OH is the eternal optimist and keeps getting his hopes up about a swap and every time he gets very disappointed. xx

highguyuk

My family have been trying for approximately 25 years. The system for social housing tenants to exchange is fundamentally broken and needs an overhaul!

dasophster

Well that certainly puts us in the shade, sorry to hear that you've been waiting for 25 years. The whole system seems to be an absolute shambles. I think the whole homeswap system needs regulating and streamlining across the board, aside from a swap legally having to he completed within 6 weeks which is universal all the different HAs and councils have different policies and different ways of managing things. One of my friends was due to move into a house in Birmingham she had swapped with however what she didn't know was that Birmingham CC approve a swap first and then ask questions later, and they only inspected the guy's place she was swapping on the day of the move. With everything loaded into a removals van she got a call from Birmingham CC saying that she cannot swap because upon inspection they found the guy had done major structural works on his house without any permission at all and the whole building was at risk of collapsing. With our HA the second step they take after all the forms are filled, is checking our property and with some HAs and councils its the first thing they do before allowing any forms to be filled out. It's also not good how there is barely any info out there with regard to how a mutual exchange is conducted, we had to look very hard online to find any information at all because our HA doesn't have any leaflets or anything on it. I find a lot of people just assume that if you've agreed to swap as a private agreement then you can swap, they don't realise there is so much red tape and paperwork that has to come first. Good luck maybe this year we will both get lucky! Xx

advice_please_2

Didn't read the whole thread but my sister and bro in law was in a £200k house, swapped it with someone in a £400k house and then the other people sold sister original house cos at the time they were struggling with high end houses

dasophster

Was that social housing though?

notanewuser

dasophster wrote: »

Was that social housing though?

advice_please wrote: »

Didn't read the whole thread but my sister and bro in law was in a £200k house, swapped it with someone in a £400k house and then the other people sold sister original house cos at the time they were struggling with high end houses

Can't have been.

squinty

The problem with these sites, and previously with landlords own registers is that people are all looking for the same thing. There are usually load of people looking to move from a crap house to a nice one - from a a flat to a house - from a small house to a big one - from a crap area to a nice one any so on and often combinations of these. Very few people want to move the other way. If you want to 'swap' you need to be realistic in what you will look at in terms of type/size/area etc.

It will be interesting to see if the bedroom tax makes any difference to this.

Kayalana99

My OH's auntie did a house swap, as far as Im aware it didn't take her long to find someone but she had a typical 3 bed house and she swapped it for a typical 3 bed house it was just a location swap more then anything.

She did however scrub every inch of that house she left, did all the moving for BOTH parties, and after she moved in(on the day anyway apparntly this woman was just smoking and leaving her to it even though it was her stuff they van shared) had to scrub every inch of the new house because it even had !!!! up the door as they had dogs & didnt look after the house, not to mention the rubbish tip they left at the bottom of the garden.

Shes all sorted now.

dasophster

squinty wrote: »

The problem with these sites, and previously with landlords own registers is that people are all looking for the same thing. There are usually load of people looking to move from a crap house to a nice one - from a a flat to a house - from a small house to a big one - from a crap area to a nice one any so on and often combinations of these. Very few people want to move the other way. If you want to 'swap' you need to be realistic in what you will look at in terms of type/size/area etc.

It will be interesting to see if the bedroom tax makes any difference to this.

That's the thing we are really open minded will accept any property type in pretty much any area in any condition, the only thing we can't really budge on is a certain number of bedrooms because our HA won't approve a swap from our side and most HAs/councils of a potential swap property wouldn't allow us to move into somewhere smaller either because then they'd be allowing overcrowding. If we didn't have soon to be 5 kids we would consider a move into the same number of bedrooms and in the past the swaps that nearly went through were into 3 bedrooms that technically speaking were smaller than our current property. Otherwise we are totally flexible and we stress that to all potential swappers and make it clear in our ad. Our flat is newbuild in a very nice development where the HA blocks are nicer and with larger room sizes than the private flats in the development (and larger than average for the Uk) but it seems everyone wants to move to a house and a bigger house than the one they currently live in.

We did wonder if the bedroom tax would have an effect, and it is early days but we have already had dealings with two families who were moving purely because of the so called bedroom tax and one turned us down because they didn't read our ad properly and would have seen there is no gas here and they wanted a gas cooker and the other was a couple with one child living at home in a 4 bedroom parlour house so counted as 4 bedroom by their HA but 5 for housing benefit purposes. That family kept getting in arrears as it was because already due to existing rules the HA were refusing to pay the full amount and now it will be even worse but in the end they changed their mind and decided not to swap as they would rather be kicked out it seems.

I personally think HAs see home swaps as a cheap way to absolve themselves of any responsibility to actually rehouse their existing tenants, even though the number of successful homeswaps seems to be virtually nil they can claim they are facilitating tenants finding the perfect place to live in. Also when you do a homeswap you're obliged to swap with the other person on a set day and the HA or council don't have to leave the property empty for 4 weeks and clean it like they would with an internal transfer xx

neas

Is it that there aren't many 5-7 bedroom houses capable of housing your brood?

I mean most social housing was probably designed as 2/3 and perhaps 4 bedroom properties to help people back in the old days to get back on their feet. They were entitled 'by law' to some help to get out of the rut they were in.

I guess another problem you will face is Im guessing theres very little movement in housing stock in that alot of people see it as there house (e.g right to buy in 20 years).

I do find it amusing though the dichotomy of HA families and private mortgage/rent families. I can at most afford to buy a four bedroom house if I am lucky and I have a relatively good job. For average joe earning 20k they will only ever be able to get a 3 bedroom house and if they had more children they would have to resort to 'overcrowding' them due to being inelligible for a HA house due to equity in house.

Just seems daft someone can save their life away to get a house but would never be able to have such a large brood on a average worker salary. But 'by law' someone else can?

Sorry for bashing but its difficult not to when you use the word 'by law'... like its your entitlement to have large broods and be susbisided by rest of us.

Whats more annoying is that now you have increased the original family size by your decision, you expect someone else to fix the problem whereas in the private/mortgage sector that responsibility is with the parents... Alot of people see this as a very broken system.

isthatreduced

I home swapped from a new build 2 bed HA to a 2 bed council house.
This was 14 years ago and it was very smooth.
I moved from England back to Scotland,the house was in a bad state but it was in Scotland and I wanted to move desperatly.We van shared(my uncle drove the van) and I am still here now(planning on buying it this summer).I was only on the register a few weeks when the guy contacted me.He came down to see it and I sent my Aunt and uncle over to have a look to see if it was worth me coming up to view it.On a low income it took me a long time to get it to how I want it and the man who exchanged had a great new property with quality carpets on down 18 months and I got crap.I was happy because I got a bigger house and garden in a good area same amount of bedrooms.
It all happened so fast I thought it would be really difficult he was the first and only person to contact me after a few weeks of being on the homeswap scheme.Guess I am saying dont give up hope it can happen,try to just put it to the back of your mind and live your life.
I see people advertising to homeswap on Gumtree,might want to look there.Good luck