As I was sipping on my coffee this morning, straight black no sugar no creme, I came across an article talking about how two families swapped houses. You’re probably wondering what I’m talking about. Well there’s nothing hidden here, one family that lived in Tennessee and one family that lived in Nevada just swapped homes. Of course, there was a method to their madness. The couple in Nevada wanted to move closer to their grandchildren who lived in Tennessee. They had put their home on the market and were getting no traffic. So this 71 year old man was researching homes selling tips on the internet(amazing that this gentleman was so internet savvy) and ran into this new tactic of “swapping houses.” With a little more research, he found a family in Tennessee that was within walking distance to his grandchildren. That family of course, was looking to move out to Nevada and the rest is history.

Just because this worked out for these families, doesn’t mean it’s as easy as popping popcorn. This concept of trading homes for vacation has been around for a while. This new method to get your house off your hands has come out of the woodwork though. However, in a down market, sellers are trying everything. You may have to make some sacrifices by downgrading in home or having to put on a hard hat and hammer away to make more space. You also have to take into consideration the amount that the other person owes on the house.

OnlineHouseTrading.com, one of at least six swap sites started in the past year. Four have started in just the past seven months, including OnlineHouseTrading.com, GoSwap.org, DaytonaHomeTrader.com and DomuSwap.com. Together the six sites have roughly 16,000 postings. At Craigslist.org, the popular ad site, the number of “home swap” listings — which includes people trading homes temporarily for vacation — jumped 56%, to 7,392 in the 12 months ending in December, the company says, and much of the growth came from people trying to permanently sell each other their homes.

Now I don’t see this becoming a trend because of all the factors that could go wrong. I can only think of one reason this may work and that is in a down market where people are extra nervous about buying a home before selling theirs. However, it’s interesting that people are willing to do just about anything when they want to move.

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