The Current Housing Market

2005 Home Sales - 30 Year Low (Source-Savills)
First-Time Buyer Numbers-25 Year Low (Source-Halifax)

2005 marked the end of a period of record UK house sales. Sales improved in 2006 but the recent intrest rate rises appear to have slowed the housing market in some areas. The shortage of first time buyers continues to be a problem. There is some concern that the introduction of compulsory Home Information Packs in June which will increasing the costs of selling will reduce the number and choice of homes for sale.

Swapping homes is quite common in the public housing sector and there are several websites dedicated to doing this. We believe we are the only website dedicated to swapping private homes. The swapping or part-exchaning of private homes is much more common than realised. It is little publicized and no statistics seem to be available.

Peter Cooke is the designer of the Swap-Homes service. During his many years in Financial Services he has arranged many residentilal and commercial mortgages. All too often he has seen his clients frustration and stress resulting from property transactions and experienced it personally with his own property dealings. This service has been born from his desire to make moving home a much speedier and more enjoyable experience.

In 2006 our first year over 10,000 properties were registered on our site and there are currently over 6,000 properties in our live database. Many swaps have taken place but it is much more common for our unique marketing approach to result in normal sales. Indeed applying our strategies has resulted in the speedy sales of perfectly good and sensibly priced houses which had languished on the market for a considerable time. We do not guarantee success but we can promise that our unique approach does attract additional viewings to houses that might otherwise have been overlooked. More viewings obviously increase the likelyhood of selling/swapping.