Since I’m off on maternity leave we’ve been trying to maximise our travel since only one of us needs to take off work. So far this year we have done 1 week in Tenerife and 6 weeks in Canada (where my husband worked remotely for half) and starting New Years Day we will be going to Portugal for two months while my husband and I are both on parental leave.
Since we were/will be gone for such long periods we were weighing options on what to do with our house.
Renting your house while away has some issues
The obvious choice would be to rent it out but it’s tricky in Ireland as there is a housing crisis and new legislation has been brought in to ban short term rentals in rent pressure zones where those properties could be used by people in need of housing. So technically we are not allowed by law to rent out our home for more than 2 weeks at a time up to 90 days in total for the year (which wouldn’t work for our 2 month continuous stint). However, you ARE allowed to rent out rooms in your house without restriction, so we had posted 2 of our 3 bedrooms for rent on Daft and we managed to find someone who wanted it for the two months BUT when I rang my home insurance broker I was told they could not cover this scenario. The only thing I could do was: renew my policy as a homeowner, pay the cancellation and take out a tenant/rental policy, pay the cancellation again on our return and take out a third homeowner policy – a bit messy and they couldn’t tell me the cancellation fees as it was too far in the future.
Other dilemmas were that any rental/tenant policies I came across had a minimum 6 month lease requirement and our standard homeowner policy has a clause where you can’t leave the home unoccupied for more than 30, 45 or 60 days (depending on the policy). Now the unoccupied issue we can get around by having friends and family check in on the place or stay a night while we are away but I never did find a rental policy for less than 6 months, even though the broker was going to sell one to me saying you can just say circumstances changed and you needed to cancel the policy (not something I was willing to take a risk on) especially since our lease would have clearly stated the 2 month term.
As insurance companies can’t quote more than 30 days in advance I struggled to get answers on prices or clauses before I was up for renewal.
Once my policy was up for renewal I called again, and found a few more options. Apparently there are mid-year change teams which can make certain changes mid-year, I was told I could ring when I wanted to change to a rental policy and they could tell me then whether that’s a change allowable by the underwriter OR at that point we could do the first option of cancelling and taking out a new policy (which brings us back to the 6 month minimum lease issue). Again, too many unknowns for us to figure out if renting out the house was worth it after insurance cancellation/change fees and rental income taxes on any profits etc.
The other downside was that we would be renting out our home to strangers and we have finally gotten the home the way we like it, we have new furniture, new wood floors etc and would be a shame to have any of it damaged while we were away not to mention that fixing/replacing any of those items would completely negate any profit we would make by renting it out. Also when I put our ad up on Facebook someone messaged me a horror story saying friends of theirs rented their house to their “friends” and when they returned the locks were changed and there was nothing the gardai could do and they had a lengthy court case just to get back into their own home – a rare occurrence I’m sure but scary none-the-less.
Ultimately we decided we were willing to take the risk as we could do due diligence when selecting tenants, the couple we found had reference letters from employers and previous landlords along with ID etc and answered all of our questions satisfactorily but again it came down to the insurance issue and added cost of that as well as the hassle of getting the house rent ready, locking away valuables while getting ready to go away for Xmas and 2 months away just didn’t make sense for us this time.
Home exchanges might be the answer
In the meantime, I had come across a home exchange site (think the movie “The Holiday” with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet), and put our home up on there, just to see if there was anyone willing to swap for the same time frame. While I didn’t get any offers for the 2 months (what? no one wants to come to Ireland in the dead of the dark, wet winter?), I DID get offers for stays throughout next year from various locations including:
- San Diego, USA
- 6 different towns in Spain
- London, UK
- Montreal, Canada
- Victoria, Canada
- Dublin, Ireland (for a weekend)
The sites we are trying out are www.homeaway.co.uk and www,homeexchange.com
At the time I didn’t think of the insurance issue either but when I asked at my renewal they said that would be considered a non-standard policy and you would need to ring every time you were doing a home swap. Finally an option I could proceed with which ensured I was covered! The quote came in at 430€ MORE than a standard home owner policy (more than double) for the year so we had a decision to make. Would we make that value back by doing exchanges?
For the year ahead, we won’t be doing too much travel so it didn’t make sense for us this year BUT the following year we hope to travel more and so will reconsider doing that next year.
The other cool thing about the exchange site is, if you don’t mind having people stay with you, you can collect points depending on the desirability of your area. So for example we would get 230 points for each night someone stayed with us, which we could then use when we are able to travel. As you would be home, you wouldn’t need to worry about the insurance issue and could collect as many points as you wish in order to use them in the future (again you wouldn’t need to worry about the insurance issue if you were leaving your home vacant at that point instead of doing an exchange).
The other benefit is you are not exchanging money so there are no tax implications. You do not need to use the points with the people that stayed with you, you are free to use them with anyone else that uses the site. There are a lot of people that have second properties on there too so you would have those places to yourself if that’s what you preferred. You can also stay with other families for points too if you were open to that.
You can also have people mind your pets and water your plants when doing exchanges and vice versa which is also a money saver. Last year for example if we look at 1 week accommodation in Tenerife and pet sitting for 7 weeks we spent 760€ so the 430€ extra for the insurance would have been covered and then some.
As accommodation is one of the biggest expenses of a holiday, the home exchange/point exchange option might be a way to dramatically reduce your holiday expenses. I was going to say this option is limited to home owners but I guess if you were building up points and having people stay with you, you could technically do this while renting if you have a spare room or two.
The only downside to having your home on the exchange site is that you get tempted every time someone messages you. For us anyway, we have considered the exchange every time we get messaged. Especially for weekends away in Europe. Flights are cheap and we could easily pop over somewhere for a weekend, stay somewhere for free and enjoy a different culture and cuisine etc. probably for less than if we had driven up to Dublin for the weekend!
The other downside to the exchanges is that you would need to get your house guest ready at the same time you are getting ready to go away, so a lot of organisation which with a toddler is already stressful, but had I found this out while I was renting before kids I would have been all over it. I still think it would be cool to host other nationalities every now and then and get to know new people.
Anyway, while we haven’t done any exchanges yet, I thought it would be an interesting concept to share in case it is enticing for others (while saving you some time around the insurance questions – just ask for a non-standard policy team if you are planning on reciprocal exchanges).
What about you? Have you done exchanges or found any other accommodation hacks? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below.