Can’t sell your house? Swap it

You can tell how bad the real estate market is by how creative homesellers get.

According to recent story by Jennifer Levitz in the Wall Street Journal’s RealEstateJournal.com, the market must be pretty awful.

Levitz wrote a story about people who instead of selling their homes, swap them. You can read the story here. What happens is that homesellers who can’t sell their properties find other sellers in the same situation. The owners then swap their homes, buying each other’s properties.

One site that allows owners to do this is OnlineHouseTrading.com. The site asks owners to list what specifics about the home they are trying to sell and about the residence they’d like to buy. It then matches prospective owners. GoSwap.org works in much the same way.

This is a creative way to help owners move their homes. It’s hard to imagine too many owners willing to go this route, though. For a swap to work, owners have to be willing to compromise, have to be willing to purchase a home that’s less than their ideal. But maybe if you’ve had your house on the market for a long enough time, a swap doesn’t sound so bad right now.