Swops came out of a Melbourne production company called Hooves. We make comedy commercials and we represent directors from Australia and around the world. A lot of the Australian directors we work with are in their twenties and early thirties, building careers in a city that takes about a third of their income in rent before they’ve bought a coffee.

One of them wanted to get away over a long weekend last year. Nothing fancy, just a few days on the coast. They looked at every option and it was all too expensive. They even tried reverse image searching listings on cheesy house swap sites to contact people directly. In the end they left their place empty, kept paying rent on it and paid again for somewhere else. That’s two houses for the price of two houses when it could have been two houses for the price of zero houses.

We spend a lot of our time at Hooves getting money into young creatives’ pockets, so watching it disappear on something with a pretty obvious fix was hard to sit with. A renter’s home is sitting right there, empty, every time they go anywhere. That’s not nothing. It seemed real dumb that no one had made it simple for renters to swop with each other, privately, without being doxxed on some cheesy homeowner-oriented swapping site and without having to explain yourself to your landlord.

So here we are, talking to you about making holidays not so dumb for renters. Let’s get together and give each other a break.