Swapping permanently - anyone done this?

[GettingVerySleepy]

We have our rural cottage up for sale on gumtree and someone emailed me inquiring about swapping. I'm not sure it will work with the person who emailed me but it got me thinking about swapping. Houses in general.

Has anyone managed to do this? Any helpful websites (I have found one and registered but I didn't get any matches). Anything to be aware of particularly? Thanks for any help you can give me!

Anyone at all? I know swapping for holidays is fairly common but I guess a permanent swap is much more rare.

We had a buyer suggest this to us. We looked at their house and hated it so we didn't go ahead with the swap, but they bought our house anyway.

So stating the obvious, but make sure you genuinely like the other house and don't let yourself be pressured

It seems a bit, well, random. Did you say that you were looking to move to a particular area or something in your ad?

I haven't done it but I know (or it certainly used to be the case) that only the "buyer" of the more expensive home pays stamp duty.

Thanks, there and lala. We decided the house that was originally offered to us is just too far to commute but on the other hand we're pretty desperate. We did say in our ad on the house swap site the county we want to move to but no one seems to want to move where our house is :-(.

my aunt and my cousin swapped houses. It was complicated in their case because my aunt has my other cousin too, and my aunt's house was bigger. So an amount was gifted to the other cousin but it was quite a small amount as my aunt legally owns my cousin's old house, and will leave half of that to each of them but I think this had to be done. Or maybe she wanted to do it as it was fairer. So that is a vague answer for you! It can be complicated. But it worked out very well for them.