NB: Swapping homes with another student is a perfect solution to reducing your student debt but all students registering to use this service must bear in mind that their parents' / guardians' co-operation in home-swap is vital.

Why am I charged £5.00 to register and what do I get for it?

The £5.00 registration fee is charged primarily as a contribution towards administrative costs of running this on-line service. It also serves as a discouragement to time-wasters.

The £5.00 fee will allow you to enter details of your home-swap requirements onto our secure database and to receive household details of a number of entries that potentially satisfy your search criteria.

Your registration details will be kept on the secure database for one year. At the end of this period you will be offered an option to renew the registration or to have your details removed from the database. You will also be able to amend your database entry details whenever necessary.

The annual £5.00 registration fee is non-refundable (see Terms and Conditions for further details).

What happens after I have registered and paid my £5.00 fee?

After you have completed the registration form and paid the registration fee, you will receive household details of a number of entries that potentially satisfy your search criteria.

  No personal details or contact details are made available at this point to anyone.

When you have found a household, within the offered selection, that you would like to make a personal contact with, you request through the database that they contact you by e-mail or tel./fax. You will then be able to proceed with further arrangements. You are advised not to give your exact home address to anyone until you and your family are satisfied that it is necessary to do so.

You will also start receiving requests from other registered students who have selected your database entry as their home-swap choice.

As more and more students register on the freehome4me.com database, the more accurate matches will result and the more choice there will be for everyone.

What if there are no matches for my search?

If there are no suitable matches for your search criteria on the database, you will be informed by a message to that effect. You will also be invited to repeat your search after a few days. As soon as any potentially suitable entries have been generated on the database, you will be offered these for consideration.

You will also start receiving requests from other registered students as soon as they have selected your database entry as their home-swap choice.

What is meant by “indirect swap”?

If you fail to find a suitable direct swap (where just two student households are involved in the home-swap), you may wish to consider creating a chain swap (e.g. indirect swap , involving three students' households, where student from a household A goes to live in a household B , student from household B goes to live in a household C , and student from household C goes to live in a household A ). Our database is able to offer this option.

However, this is a potentially less stable arrangement and the families involved should proceed with greater care and allow time for establishing each other's suitability. Creation of a chain with more than three families is also possible but is not recommended.

What happens if my home-swap arrangements break down?

To cover this possibility, the families SHOULD have a contingency plan worked out and agreed in advance which would suit their own circumstances (consider doing this in writing) . But, as long as you are prepared to respect the household rules in your new home and show consideration to all family members, and if the details of your home-swap have been discussed and agreed in all honesty beforehand, there is no reason (with the exception of force majeure) why the arrangement should breakdown .

What if one student wants to leave and move in with university friends after the first academic year but the other one does not?

This may happen but, again, your contingency plan should cover this eventuality too. Perhaps you should all agree that such opting-out would only be acceptable at the end of academic year so as to give the other student and his/her family enough time to make alternative arrangements (perhaps by initiating a new home-swap for themselves).

But there is, in fact, no need to completely terminate the home-swap arrangement if one of the students decides to move on and the other wishes to stay. If the second student has been getting on well with his host family and does not want to leave his host family (after a year – they are no strangers!), they will probably be happy to accept some nominal financial contribution towards their own student's living expenses. With no deposits and high rents to pay, this is still much better situation for the second student than having to rent from a private landlord (see Guidance Notes).

Will our home insurance policy be affected by the home-swap?

It is possible, but individual circumstances will vary. Therefore, it is important that both families check all relevant insurance policies they have and, in case of any uncertainty, consult their insurance companies.

See GUIDANCE NOTES and TERMS AND CONDITONS for more information about this service.