Can’t Sell Your Home? Swap That Baby! at Reality on Realty

Can’t Sell Your Home? Swap That Baby!

Published

on January 27, 2009

in Home Buying, Home Selling and Online Resources

. Tags: home exchanges, house swapping, permanent house swaps.

Bartering is where it’s at. Just check out your local Craig’s List and you’ll find a long list of people offering to trade some object or service for another object or service. Real life CL examples: a bunny for a puppy, a Rolex watch for a SUV, carpentry skills for a satellite dish installation.

And yeah, it makes sense when you’re talking about carpentry skills or a Rolex watch (not so sure about the bunny). But what kind of sense does it make when you’re talking about swapping a house?

Judging from the mushrooming numbers of permanent houseswap websites (not the vacation houseswaps we wrote about last week), it’s making a lot of sense for some. After all, if you can’t sell your home, why not exchange it? Home exchange sites include goswap.org, domuswap.com, besthouseswap.com and onlinehousetrading.com , to name just a few. And it’s easy to see how these desperate times could lead to these fairly desperate measures. Certainly, bartering a house is better than giving it away for free.

After spending some time surfing these sites, however, I have to wonder at the viability of it all. How likely is it to find someone who wants to live in your city, in your neighborhood in your particular home where you’ll feel just as enthusiastic about moving into their digs? I also notice that many house swap homes fall into three categories: 1) They are out in the boonies. 2) They are in markets so deep in trouble that you would hardly want to swap into them. 3) They are NOT in highly desirable cities —like New York, San Francisco or Boston — likely because the housing markets in these places isn’t bad enough for folks to resort to bartering. So if you hope to get to one of these cities, either you’ll have to make some major concessions or just forget the whole idea.

So when can house swapping work?

Well, just as in online dating, attempt house swapping only if:

1) You have lots of patience. Finding the exact right house for a trade isn’t going to be easy.
2) You are tremendously flexible. You can’t expect to find everything you want on your wishlist and you’ve got to be prepared to make some compromises.
3) You do your homework. Just like you’d “google” a prospective online date, you’d better visit the house you want to exchange for AND hire a home inspector.
4) You look at the financial implications. You’ll still need a new mortgage on your new place and you’ll still have to go through closing. Make sure you do the closings on both homes simultaneously so you’re never carrying two mortgages.
5) You get professional help. You’ll need an attorney and/or realtor to help you through the process.

House swapping can work for some, but just as in online dating, you’ve got to approach the whole thing with caution and a sense of humor.