Swanepoel holds a bachelor’s degree in science from the University of Pretoria, a Master's degree in Business Economics from the University of Johannesburg, and diplomas in arbitration, mergers and acquisitions, real estate, computer science and marketing.

Swanepoel has penned 17 books and reports, including the Swanepoel Trends Report, an annual analysis of the changes and trends impacting the residential real estate business in the United States, and his comments on how these trends affect real estate agents and consumers have been published in the Wall Street Journal. In 2006, Swanepoel cautioned that too many agents were entering real estate, while in 2007, he declared “new business models and paradigm Ssift” as the fundamental business trends in the industry. These "new paradigm" companies are spawned largely by new technology, including consumer access to information that was once available only to real estate agents, such as multiple listing services.