I own a cottage on Lake Nipissing and would prefer one closer to Ottawa, where I live. I would like to know if there are cottage owners in the Ottawa area who, like me, would prefer a cottage closer to their home or family in the North Bay/Sudbury area, and may be interested in a cottage trade. Do any real estate agencies offer this type
of service?—Jean-Guy Hardy, via email
No real estate expert that we asked could give us any leads on an agency that specializes in such a service. But this doesn’t mean that you couldn’t find one willing to facilitate a trade. The question is, should you?
“At first, it seems logical,” says Martin Elder, a broker in Ottawa. “But the crux of it comes down to: if it was a good strategy, why wouldn’t everyone do that? The whole real estate industry is developed around attaining the best value in the quickest amount of time.” He doesn’t think that a cottage trade would achieve that goal for anybody.
The first hurdle would be finding a property that was appraised at the same value as yours. “Right away, there’s a potential discrepancy between the value of one property vs. the value of the other,” says Elder. Say one cottage is appraised at $500,000 and the other at $700,000; even if both owners are on board, what if one person needs a mortgage? Banks are often reluctant to lend money for a cottage purchase. “The bars for acceptance are automatically higher,” says Elder. A bank might see a cottage “trade” as even more of a risk if they feel that there are “unknowns in the situation.”
Money aside, “What about the intangibles?” he wonders. Sure, you might find someone willing to sell a cottage with roughly the same square footage, the same number of bedrooms, and the same size of dock as yours, but would you be willing to, for example, give up your amazing view and your lake’s excellent water quality for a heavily treed property and weed-prone water? Is that kind of trade worth a shorter commute?
“It’s probably simpler to get two real estate agents in two different areas,” says Elder. That way, you’re more likely to sell the cottage that you don’t want and get the cottage that you do want.
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