WIBU to house swap with a friend instead of sell on the open market?

[colachive]

Context is that I own my 2 bed (very dinky!) terrace house close to the centre of a leafy, quite upmarket city in the north - although it has dodgy areas like everywhere. House is worth about 245k according to estate agent valuation. I bought it for 180k seven years ago. In the intervening years I met DP and he has moved in, and now we’re looking to upsize and potentially have DC (some time pressure there as I am late 30s. That’s relevant for this topic.)

Now, one of my close friends has recently lost her DP to illness. She has a large ish home (4 bed semi) in a more rural area about an hour from me by train. Hers is also worth about 240-255 she reckons. She wants to move back to the city. We met for drinks last night and at some point we cooked up a plan… swapping our houses! So she would own mine and me (and DP) would own hers.

we’re thinking:

• no estate agents fees and hassle
• no viewings and keeping the house immaculate
• no messing about with offers / gazumping / gazundering

obvioisly we’d still pay for surveys, have valuations done and pay stamp duty as well as employ solicitors to take care of paperwork. but we’d cut out a lot of faff.

has anyone any experience of this??? Are we completely mad?!?

all input welcome!

How would it affect your friendship if one of you discovered a problem the other hadn’t disclosed before the sale?

My sisters did a house swap! It can definitely be done. No estate agents but obvs remortgage and solicitors etc. Absolutely a thing.

I know someone who sold their house to the person that they were buying from, they were upsizing, their seller was downsizing, but they didn't know each other beforehand.

I think it's a good idea, but has the potential to affect your friendship. People can behave quite strangely when money is involved.

Yes I suppose the friendship being at risk is the worrying part. But I was hoping we could leave the money stuff up to the lawyers. And perhaps say, if hers is valued at 255, do we pay her 10k for it ? To make up the difference? But maybe that’s overcomplicating!

We did it! There were moments of stress but so so so so much easier than us trying to sell our house and deal with a chain now, i didn’t even appreciate how much easier it was haha

My mother downsized to our house and we upsized to her house. We paid the difference in values to her (each got same estate agent to value).
was plain sailing - brilliant outcome all round. Particularly as she gave the price difference to my brothers for a deposit on their first houses.

No that’s not really over complicating it. All the legal processes etc required would be exactly the same whether you swap for the same value, or if there was a cash payment required either way to compensate for the differing values.

Thanks for all the responses! For those that have done this, did you port your existing mortgage? Any hiccups with that?

And did anyone feel they would have done better on open market?

MIL and SIL did this. MIL had a rental property near her and SIL moved in there and MIL rented out their old house. I think SIL did pay MIL some money as well.
It all went fine as far as I know but MIL DID get upset when SIL and BIL wanted to move again a few years later as they had got it under market value so they made a large profit