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House Barter? Some Frustrated Sellers Try to Swap Homes

If you happen to have a single family home in the Orange School District, worth around $300 grand, and you’d like to move to Lyndhurst, get in touch with Anand Nader. He’s looking to swap his house with yours.

NADAR: it’s very spacious, lots of sunlight.

The Nadars moved to the Cleveland area last year from Iowa. Their former home stayed on the market for months, and they ultimately ended up renting it out. With the housing market no better now, they thought they’d try something different this time.

NADAR: From our experiences in trying to sell our Iowa house, we knew it’d be very expensive trying to sell this house and move to another house.

So Nadar’s wife posted a short ad on the housing swap section of the online classified site craigslist. So far no takers, but the Nadars aren’t alone. Another website called OnlineHouseTrading.com says it lists over 700 homes for swap in the greater Cleveland area. The idea is that you go on the site and list your home, and if there’s a comparable home where you want to move, you’re in luck.

The site’s CEO Daniel Westbrook says a permanent house-swap, or reciprocal selling as some call it, is attractive in this market.

WESTBROOK: What we do is take the most motivated people in the market, which are sellers, and put them together. So, if you’re a seller and you’re willing to buy something else, as long as someone’s willing to buy your home, you’re going to be motivated.

With over four million homes for sale in the US, the housing swap market is still a tiny niche. Walter Molony of the National Association of Realtors says it isn’t showing up yet in data as a trend, but he hears about home swaps most in markets with an oversupply of housing stock. But he warns those thinking of trying it that a successful trade can be hard to orchestrate.

MOLONY: It’s tough to do. It requires a great deal of luck considering the location, the type of home, the amenities, there are going to be differences so it’s hard to find an equal swap.

That’s OK for the Nadar family. They’re content in Lyndhurst until someone comes along with the perfect house to swap.

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