You’ve been tracking them for some time. You know where they live, how old they are, what they do. You know when their home will be empty and for how long they’ll be away. And then, soon after they’ve left, you make your move.

You turn the key, switch off the alarm and have a long look around. You check out the CDs, the bookshelves, the artwork. You eat off their plates, sleep in their linen. Within a day or two, you’re even adopting their lifestyle: going to their favourite restaurants, using their bikes, driving their car. You might even annexe their friends.

It sounds like a sequel to Single White Female, but there’s a crucial difference: your “victim” has been offered the chance to do precisely the same thing in your home. And there’s not just trust, but enormous goodwill, on both sides of the bargain.

House-swapping was once considered something of an oddity, along with cycling to work and composting vegetable waste. Suddenly, it is fashionable. Gumtree.com, a listings website, reported last week that more than 13,000 families have registered to exchange their homes — up 61% on a year ago.

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Whether because of the credit crunch or just because of the realisation that there are cheaper — and better — ways to get to know a place than staying in a hotel, more and more people are at it. And more and more organisations are being set up to cater for their needs.

But what is it actually like? Over the past five years, we have exchanged our three-bedroom end-of-terrace house in unglamorous Harlesden, northwest London, for a palatial maison de maître in Brittany, a modernist villa in achingly fashionable Antwerp and a cosy cottage in Somerset.

We’ve spent high summer on the Adriatic and deep midwinter in snowbound Vienna. Most recently, we stayed in a four-bedroom appartement near the Eiffel Tower that came with scooters for the children, Sonia Rykiel sheets (divine, since you ask) and an oven so state-of-the-art, it had three settings for brioche.

Based on a hotel stay costing £100 a night for a family of four, our 10 exchanges have saved us £10,000. But it’s not just about money. By swapping homes, we’ve gained an insight into the lives of others — and also come to look at our home in a new light.

The first stage in any swap is preparing photos for uploading to the internet. You’re effectively acting as your own agent, putting yourself in a global shop window, which makes you look afresh at all those little flaws that you have grown used to, but would be ashamed to show a visitor.

As my wife, Clare, would no doubt agree, I’ve always had an, er, easy-going approach to home maintenance. Call me a DDIYer — as in “don’t”. Exchanging has brought out my (well) hidden house pride.

It began with our first swap, in a village near Ghent, Belgium, in 2004. For months after we’d moved to Harlesden, cardboard removal boxes crammed full of toys had lurked balefully, unused, in the children’s room. Suddenly they were gone, replaced by brightly coloured plastic tubs, labelled with almost obsessive precision.

Chipped mugs and unmatched cutlery were banished; Egyptian cotton sheets arrived in the bedroom; shelving units sprouted in the kitchen and front room. Ikea morphed into Habitat; CDs and records were neatly filed away.

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