My wife & I have been looking for a cozy cottage on a lake somewhere, while fixing up our right-off-the-highway-in-a-good-neighborhood-across-from-a-school house, and it occured to us that it would be really cool if we could somehow sidestep the process of giving thousands of dollars to inept real estate agencies & simply trade. If a network could be formed, this would be quite easy. Has this been done before, and is anyone doing this now?
Monk - What exactly would you be trading? If you are fixing up your suburban home, seems you wouldn’t want to part with that…So what would you be trading with?
As for house swapping, yes that is something that is very real. Sometimes done among family members sometimes done when someone wants to downsize their home and another wants to upgrade, they come to a legal agreement to swap homes. Among , family members the IRS allows a one time gift of up to 125k, or a yearly gift of up to 11K a month for a certain amount of years…
Monk do you mean trade permanently, or temporarily? I know there are organizations through which people swap houses temporarily. This is done mostly when someone has a closed end assignment in another country, for instance, and wants to move back to their own house when they are done.
If you mean swap houses permanently rather than selling, I guess it could be done. But you would have to find someone who owned a house you would want to move to, who wanted to sell, and most importantly, who wanted to move into your house as well. Then, unless by some miracle both parties could agree that both houses happened to be worth exactly the same amount of money, there would still be some money changing hands.
I think it would be a very rare occurence that all these conditions would be satisfied. It is hard enough finding a house you want to buy, let alone persuading the current inhabitants to take YOUR house.
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I’d be trading my house.
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“But you would have to find someone who owned a house you would want to move to, who wanted to sell, and most importantly, who wanted to move into your house as well. Then, unless by some miracle both parties could agree that both houses happened to be worth exactly the same amount of money, there would still be some money changing hands.”
Which is exactly why I suggested a network. That way, all this would be bypassed. Most everyone who moves out of a house moves into another.
You missed the most important point: unless the two homes are of exactly equal value, or the owner of the more expensive home just doesn’t care, there’s gonna be money traded too, to make up the difference in values.
Even if the homes are of exactly equal value, you’re still gonna be shelling out a hefty sum to various professionals. I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone exchange homes without title insurance, for instance. I also wouldn’t recommend that you draw up the quit-claim deeds yourself, or at least without a lawyer looking at it before you file it with the county. A professional inspection is another good idea: you don’t want to be stuck with a home that has major structural or foundation issues that you might not catch on your own.
So, have you had some kind of bad experience with incompetent real estate agents that brought this on?
Back in the late 40s, two families living on the same street of identical row houses as my grandmother each decided they liked the other house better and agreed to trade even up. One was north of grandma and the other south. So one Saturday we were treated to this extraordinary sight the two families helping each other carry couches, beds, even fridges up the street, down the street, while I was on the porch of grandma’s house watching. I was about 10 or 11 at the time, so I have no idea what legal arrangements they made, but I assume they would have had to assign a price and pay the real estate transfer taxes (which I think was 1% for the city and the same for the state).
And most everyone who moves out of one house and into another prefers not to lose any equity they might have in their current home in the bargain, although granted this is sometimes unavoidable.
Sorry, I still don’t get it. You would pick a new house from a pool of available houses? And the people who had lived in those houses would have made them available for you or other people to move into, on the off chance that someone somewhere would someday put into the pool (or network, if you prefer) a house that they would want to move into? Where do they live in the meantime?
I guess so. Yankee pitchers Peterson & Kekich traed wives & kids 30 years ago.