The centuries-old art “BARTER” has taken a new modern spin with the advent of technology, ubiquity of smartphones and speed of inter-connectivity. The e-commerce is envisioning creating online barter platform for each and everything, including services. By creating this online marketplace, companies soar for rapid growth and gain a strong opportunity to raise entry barriers for possible competition. While online bartering or exchange has already become a common concept, the trend is fast entering the real estate space as well.

The idea behind bartering is that whatever is useless for a person can be useful for someone else or one can optimize their capital investment by way of barter, especially in case of real estate/property. This not only allows one to save time and money, but also make users meet new people over barter.

Specifically considering real estate, as the property market has fallen flat, the transactions are almost nil or minimal. In this case, the property exchange model emerges as an alternate to sale. For instance, if there are no serious buyers for a 2BHK apartment that one needs to liquidate in the market; and on the same deal if they get an option to exchange the said flat with an office space or shop that can fetch much better rental yield, it forms an ideal barter deal. To make things easier, the entire process will not even require any monetary transaction if both the properties fall under the same municipal limits. It makes a win-win situation for both the parties.

Property exchange opens new business arenas for property consultants. They can identify the needs of various clients, the kind of property they need in exchange, the location and the value of the property. The customer will ultimately get the desired property, without paying the one time brokerage cost. Moreover, they can save big on the stamp duty if the two the properties are in the same municipal limits. In that case, an Exchange Deed shall be executed, instead of a sale deed and the stamp duty shall be levied on one property, whose value is on the higher side.

A property exchange transaction can be done with a real estate developer as well. In this scenario, the developer shall exchange his under-construction property with a ready property of the customer. Some developers are even ready to offer monetary returns to the customers until they hand over the possession of their under construction property. In this case, the customer can also earn on the capital appreciation of the under construction property which has a higher scope of growth, in comparison to a ready property which is already almost saturated in terms of price appreciation.

Customer going for exchange of properties have to be diligent about their deals. BEFORE THERE WAS MONEY, THERE WAS BARTERING. NOW IT’S BACK WITH ITS NEW VERSION known as the ONLINE BARTERING.

By Harinder Singh,