With the current housing market in the U.S. stagnant and looking for solutions amid rising foreclosures, soaring inflation and market uncertainty, an unlikely market has come to the rescue. The dating scene has been perfecting matchmaking for years now on the Internet and some budding entrepreneurs are now applying these matchmaking technologies with housing inventory.

As simple as entering in things like your location, pictures, price ranges and desired location and other amenities, you are provided with a potential list of matches. Most of the house matching websites don’t let you get too far into the details of their sites without either registering or in some cases actually listing a piece of land or a house that you intend to swap.

The name that has been coined for this new innovation is called house swapping. The process of house swapping really isn’t all that new and has been taking place for about as long as houses have come on the scene. The change to the new outlook over the old however, is that most people typically only have house swapped in the past for weeks or months. Essentially people were swapping houses for extended vacations that afforded them luxuries that a hotel cannot provide. Taking this active market one step further, now home owners are looking to go long term with their swap.

Hollywood has even had it’s day with producing a full length feature film, parading the good and the bad of the house swap idea. The Holiday was released in December 2006 and starred Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black. In true Hollywood fashion, everything seemed to slightly be a disaster with the vacation housing swap, but eventually turned into a successful love trap of success. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet both found by accident, perfect lovers to fit their lives due to their crafty swap.

Even though Hollywood portrays the housing swap as a path to an adventurous love life and success, the housing swap scene isn’t as perfect as some home owner’s probably dream. The major difference with the current direction of the housing swap idea is a long term and finalized transaction that takes people from regionally close locations, all the way to far distances and countries and matches them up for a real estate swap. In a market where it’s becoming harder, day after day, to sell a house on the market, frustrated sellers can swap instead and break free of their real estate shackles.

While the house swap will get a seller out of their home and into another, it might not be the dream home they had in mind or have the specific attributes of their detailed list such as number of bedrooms, fireplace, multiple full baths, you name it. Buyers and sellers in a housing swap have to let go of specific details and not be so picky when finding a swap partner. Even though you can lose out on fine details of your dream home, successful house swappers say that they’re happy with their trade and the ability to move a house in a market that is otherwise stagnant.

There are a number of other things that house swappers should take into consideration. If the house swap is not an equal value swap there will need to be adjustments made in a lump some of cash to make up the difference after final appraisals have been made. Another strong suggestion is that when completing a housing swap that you should always try to use the same title company and have appropriate documentation to ensure the deal isn’t closed before both sides of the deal are completed. In a nightmare situation, a house swapper could end up with more than one mortgage if the other swapper pulls out before the deal is finalized.

The non-vacation house swapping market has been ignited at the end of 2007. There are about four major websites providing matchmaking for the new trendy real estate transaction. We have provided a traffic graph below that shows the sites trending well all the way into 2008, showing promise to a new innovative solution for the stagnant housing market. In addition to the websites featured below in the traffic graph, Craigslist.org is seeing 50%+ growth in it’s housing swap categories. The benefit to Craigslist is that you can test the waters of the housing swap market for free.

With the leading housing swap matchmaking sites like GoSwap.org, DomuSwap.com, OnlineHouseTrading.com and House4Trade.com looking pretty good on their growth, you can expect more and more people to be looking to these new innovative ways to potentially place that sold sign in their front yard. As sellers sign on the dotted line for their swap, a good number of them have one more benefit to this new type of transaction, no realtor fees. With the economy uncertain and foreclosures on the rise, any way to save money is always something welcomed with open arms.