The Myth

The Short Answer

"Free" means free to you, not free. In England, social landlords must offer their tenants a mutual exchange service without charging them a fee. Most do it by paying a subscription to an online swap service, and the biggest is HomeSwapper. That subscription comes out of your landlord's budget, and a social landlord's main income is the rent its tenants pay. So the service is paid for by tenants. Just not directly, and not only by the ones who use it.

How It Came About

This model wasn't dreamt up by the swap sites. It came from the government. Mutual exchange was little known, and ministers wanted it to help tenants move more easily, so it became part of the social housing reforms that went with the Localism Act 2011.

• October 2011: the government launched HomeSwap Direct, linking four online exchange services, HomeSwapper among them, so tenants could see swaps across the country.
• 1 April 2012: a new Tenancy Standard required social landlords in England to subscribe to an internet-based mutual exchange service.
• Today: the regulator's Tenancy Standard (April 2024) says landlords must let tenants see available matches "without payment of a fee". It doesn't name a service.

So landlords had to buy a service, and tenants couldn't be charged for it. The rule is a fair one: nobody should have to pay to use a right they already have. But it meant the money had to come from somewhere, and in social housing, that somewhere is the rent.

What It Costs

There's no public price list, but public contracts are published. These ten show what landlords have agreed to pay for HomeSwapper:

Values are as published on each contract notice. Five of these contracts were awarded directly, with no other service invited to bid. Many landlords don't publish what they pay at all, so these are only the ones on public record.

Spread across a landlord's homes, it works out at roughly 60p to £4 per home a year. Bigger landlords pay least per home: Citizen, Amplius and Doncaster come to around 60p each, Stevenage about £1.40, and smaller councils like Wealden and Gosport £3 to £4. That's our own sum, dividing each contract's yearly cost by the number of homes the landlord reports. It's not a fortune for any one tenant. The point is that every tenant pays it, whether they ever swap or not.

And it isn't free for everyone. HomeSwapper's own help page says that if your landlord isn't registered, you pay yourself: £12 for 3 months, £16 for 6 months or £24 for a year.

Everyone Pays, A Few Use It

Think about who is in a landlord's homes. The couple who've lived on the same street for thirty years. The family who just moved in and love it. The pensioner who will never move again. Their rent helps pay for the exchange subscription too, though they'll never open an account.

That's a socialised cost: shared by everyone, used by the few who want to swap. You might think that's fair, the way a library is. But it means the people paying aren't the people using it, and the people using it aren't the customer. The swap site's customer is your landlord.

Why "Free" Fills Up With Ghosts

When something costs you nothing to keep, nothing ever nudges you to let it go. People find a home, give up, or change their minds, and their adverts often stay up. No one is doing anything wrong. It's just what happens to any list that's free to stay on.

If you've used a free swap site, you may know the feeling:

• You message a great match, and never hear back.
• The home you liked was swapped months ago, but it still shows.
• The list looks huge, but the people who reply are few.

A big number of members sounds impressive. The number that matters is how many of them will answer you this week.

Who The Model Works For

• The landlord: a subscription shows the regulator it offers a mutual exchange service. Whether you actually swap is a separate question.
• The swap site: it's paid by landlords, so its income doesn't depend on whether any one tenant finds a home.
• The tenant who wants to move: gets the account, and a list that includes people who stopped looking long ago.
• The tenant who never wants to move: helps pay for it anyway.

Is Anyone Breaking The Rules?

No. Landlords are doing what the regulator asks, and the swap sites are selling what landlords buy. Our point isn't that anyone is cheating. It's that "free" hides who pays, and a list nobody pays to stay on fills up with people who've stopped looking.

Will My Landlord Accept A Swap Found Here?

Your landlord looks at the exchange itself: you, the other tenant and both homes. Where you found each other doesn't come into it. You apply to your landlord in the normal way, whichever site you used.

Can I Use Both?

Of course. Keep your landlord's account if you have one. Just list here too, and see who answers.