Swapping Homes and Working in Another Country: One Year Home Exchange Request - Australia for the UK

Most home exchanges are for fairly short holiday periods of around one to four weeks. However, a growing number of Home Base Holidays members are looking for longer swaps of up to a year, often with the intention of working and sending children to local schools. This is an ideal way for a family to really immerse into another country and culture but, finding suitable home swaps for longer periods can be more problematic and require extra planning, starting at least a year before the dates an exchange is wanted (and the more flexible you can be on location, dates and length of exchange, the better).

Louise, a recent Home Base Holidays member from the delightfully named village of Yackandandah in Victoria, Australia, is hoping her family (husband and three children, ages 11, 9 and 6) will be able to arrange a one year swap to the UK, preferably starting this August. Louise and her husband are both social workers and are very flexible on where in the UK they exchange to but, of course, this will partly depend on where they can find jobs too. It is somewhat of a chicken and egg situation - arrange a home exchange and then look for jobs in the area or find jobs first and then be limited on the area they can consider for a home swap? However, as experienced social workers, hopefully Louise and her husband (who are in contact with recruitment agencies in the UK) will not find it a problem finding temporary jobs.

Do check out Louise's exchange offer (that's a view of the family's three bedroom cottage above) and, if you are already a Home Base Holidays member, log on to view her full listing, HE18288. Contact her right away if you could be interested in either the full one year exchange or for a part of this period. Louise will answer any questions you have.

Just after I had written to Louise with some suggestions for increasing her family's chances of finding a suitable one year exchange to the UK, I received the latest Foreign Exchange, ExpatExchange.com's weekly newsletter, which included an article, '15 Top Tips About Moving to the UK', by Sharon Dziruni of Venna Property Finders in London. Sharon's article includes information and links to websites that would be useful for those planning an exchange to the UK of a few months as well as for people planning permanent moves and looking for homes to rent.

Comments

[Jane Gibson]

I recently moved with my family across to the UK from Australia. I actually contacted an international property finder, Khalil & Kane, to see if they had anyone looking for a property to rent in Melboure - it wasn't as quick as we all would like, but sure enough 3 weeks later we received a phone call asking whether they could view our humble abode with a client who was interested in renting for a year...We had a two hour panic cleaning the place up, but they loved it! We've been in London 3 months now...give me Melbourne any day...