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Why sell your house, just swap it!
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Chris and I have been very busy with home improvement projects as we prepare to trade in our two homes for a larger one that can better accommodate our new, six-person blended family. We listed one home last week with no seekers thus far – even though the house is listed 10% lower than its purchase price just a few years ago. I then noticed the housing swap classifieds on craigslist.org and became intrigued. With more sellers than buyers on the market, more and more persons are looking to trade their homes rather than complete the two-step process of selling than buying. The process is very much so like Yahoo! Personals or Match.com sites, only rather than finding your soul mate, you are hoping to match up with another prospective home seller/buyer that may be looking to downsize while you are looking to upsize or that is looking to move to your city/state while you are looking to move to theirs. What a phenomenal idea – at least it will be as home sellers and buyers open up to the idea. Most house trade/swap sites recommend you use this technique as a supplement to traditional MLS listing or classified ads which cater to new home buyers. To learn more about the process…
A few words to the wise: Both deals should close simultaneously with both parties using the same title company. Avoid trading with someone who owes more than the house is worth, because this person may have difficulty obtaining a new mortgage, according to OnlineHouseTrading.com.
Each of the following websites allow you to post multiple pictures (as many as 20) and a description of your home along what you are looking for in a new home (written description, no. of bedrooms & bathrooms, garage size, cities/zips you will consider, etc.).
Onlinehousetrading.com charges a one-time fee of $19.95 for a basic account. OnlineHouseTrading.com claims their marketing program brings an estimated 1 million people to their site each month (though only slightly more than 30,000 are unique visitors according to quantcast.com). Sources speculate there are an estimated 14,000 properties listed in the website’s database.
Domuswap.com – DomuSwap listings are currently free. DomuSwap intends to continue the free offer for some time and will always offer a free listing option. DomuSwap listings are valid until you sell your home, however long that takes. You may be asked to renew your listing (at no cost) periodically to make sure expired listings are removed. Though Domuswap has a selection to “Post listing to Craigslist,” we have yet to see our listing appear there. There are approximately 3,700 houses listed on DomuSwap.com, with about one in ten percent listed by real estate agents and another 32 new listing appearing just yesterday alone. According to quantcast.com, Domuswap reaches approximately
Craigslist.org – You may post anything you wish to sell, give away or barter – including houses – on Craigslist.org at absolutely no cost to you. “At Craigslist.org, the popular ad site, the number of ‘home swap’ listings—which includes people trading homes temporarily for vacation—jumped 56 percent, 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,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
GoSwap.org is growing via viral advertising. All listings are free until swapped or sold as long as you invite four people to visit their website. Otherwise, the cost for basic services is $19. As with other sites, account upgrades may include advertising on search engines or publications such as Homes&Land; virtual tours or property trading advise. GoSwap currently shows about 1,000 listings.
Pad4pad.com appears to be a newer site and does not get nearly the site traffic, yet we decided to post here as well. Similar to goswap.org, pad4pad asks for email addresses of five other interested parties in order to forgo the listing fee.
Listing on all five sites cost us less than $20. Wish us luck!
Stay on top of Blackfriday with Spoofriday
Everyone loves a deal, not everyone loves getting up at the crack of dawn with a belly full of Turkey to scavenge for deals but for masses of crazy Turkey full deal searches Spoofriday is a real catch .Spoofriday has just about every after Thanksgiving deal know to man. Every ad from just about every store is there in PDF and ZIP form. They even have a HOT DEALS section that highlights the best deals for “BlackFriday”. So if you plan on being conscious the morning after Thanksgiving get a piece of the deal action and don’t forget to plan ahead with Spoofriday.
When buying Refurbished is a Bonus
Its said that 1 out of every 2 electronics devices that are returned are not faulty at all. Blame confusing electronics or buyers remorse at dropping $300 on an item and next week a new and better item emerges. So why do you care? Because you can find some awesome deals on refurbished or resold product.
If you check out ebay you will notice many of the electronics (especially big ticket items) are sold as refurbished or returned items. Keep in mind the item that was returned has over a 50% chance of having nothing wrong with it. Most items are returned to the manufacturer where they run it through a testing process that is usually pretty intensive and then it is re offered to the public as “refurbished”. Rarely are products fixed when an item is refurbished as it takes too many man hours to refurbish an item, you are simply buying something that was a demo or something someone bought and returned because they could. The truly broken items are usually destroyed and written off. So how do you go about getting a refurbished item?
One place is RefurbDepot.com, they specialize in refurbished products. The extra added benefit is that they offer warranties up to 3 years on some of their products. So not only to you get a great price you get protection on that new purchase that exceeds the 90 day warranty included with the new product. So think of it this way, you could go to Best Buy spend $2200 on that new plasma big screen and on day 91 your manufactures warranty is nothing but paper and nice font. Whereas a refurbished product on day 91 gets repaired or replaced by the manufacturer.
Scavenge for Freebies and Deals with Spoofee
Where do you find your deals? Coupon sites are dime a dozen but it seems very few have the community behind them like Spoofee. Spoofee makes sense of the coupons and discounts online and relates them to something you can actually use.
For example amazon may have a coupon for $10 off a $20 item but when used in conjunction with the same products manufacturer’s $10 rebate you could end up paying absolutely nothing. Its rare that a site can save you money but here at the corporate headquarters we were able to save over $250 off our Staples office supplies by taking existing discounts and applying their 12% off coupon.
Their community of deal scavengers rate products and deals so you get a idea up front whether or not something is a good deal and their community is as sharp and savvy as you can get. So kudos to Spoofee and good look bargain hunting.
