In a move to break the contingency stalemate, where deals can’t close until buyers sell their current home, a handful of builders in the Triangle are making offers that move-up buyers find hard to refuse: buying your lower-priced house in exchange for you buying one of their brand-new ones.

“We’ve done it several times through the years,” said Betty Ray, president of the family-owned Olde Heritage Homes in Zebulon, in business since 1972. “We buy theirs at its appraised value; they buy ours at its appraised value.”

Buyers with good job security recognize they can get more for their housing dollars than they could a year or two ago.

“Interest rates are great. There are some very good values in the marketplace,” said Ron Braswell, owner of Braswell Construction Co. in Raleigh. He recently let it be known he was open to buying a house in exchange for selling one of his.

“When we purchase a consumer’s home, that opens up the option for that consumer to purchase my home,” he said.

Builders need to get creative in highly competitive markets such as this one. Buyers have much to choose from, not only from among a plethora of resale homes but from large inventories of new homes offered by builders. Some builders are paring their prices. Home foreclosures create even more competition. Olde Heritage Homes found itself competing against its own product when a home the company had sold less than a year ago went into foreclosure and was back on the market, priced significantly lower than the houses Olde Heritage still had for sale in the same neighborhood. “It’s hard to compete against that,” Ray said. “It costs us more to build a house new than the one that’s for sale.”

J.M. Davis has run his own company, J.M. Davis Custom Homes in Raleigh, for 14 of the 24 years he has been building houses. “Never have I ever had to trade a house,” Davis said.

But when a couple let it be known that they would buy an $850,000 house from Davis if he would buy their 10-year-old house priced at $468,000, he agreed to the swap. The resale house, though it needed updating, was in a desirable neighborhood. Davis invested in upgrades for the resale house and put it back on the market.

“I’ll probably break even on it,” Davis said, “but I had to do that to sell my house.”

The buying-to-sell strategy benefits both parties. The buyers of the new house can take advantage of the current buyer’s market without having to carry two mortgages for an indefinite period. Even if the builder has to take out a loan to pay for the resale house, it is in the form of a conventional mortgage instead of a construction loan.

“With a construction loan,” Davis said, “your terms could change after a year, depending on the bank.”

In a buy-to-sell deal, each sales contract is contingent on both properties closing on the same date, said Linda Trevor, a Re/Max United broker in Cary who was the listing agent for a builder in a buy-to-sell transaction recently. When a buyer approached her with an offer to buy a $500,000 home in Garner from builder Patti Galloway, owner of Zealand Homes, contingent upon Galloway buying the prospective buyer’s $200,000 home in Clayton, Galloway researched the Clayton property to make sure it made sense to buy.

“The builder saw it as a great way to free up cash flow,” Trevor said. “She now has less risk and fewer expenses with a lower-priced property. Plus, she is hoping that the price point of under $200,000 will move quicker in this market.”

An $8,000 federal tax credit that recently took effect for first-time home buyers may ignite some sales in the starter homes market, which, in turn, will free move-up buyers to purchase mid-priced homes.

“When the home market takes off, everything else follows. Even car sales go up,” Davis said. “When a person buys a new house, they have to buy blinds and furniture.”

Just in case a buyer is put off by the added expense of blinds and furniture, Mary Kim, a broker associate with Re/Max United in Cary has a listing with sellers willing to sell their 3,400-square-foot home in Morrisville almost completely furnished. Both the buyer and seller save on moving expenses, and the move-up buyer saves again by not having to pay more to furnish a larger house.

“Within $25,000 either way of our price point [$425,000], there are 56 homes for sale in Morrisville and Western Cary, and four pending sales,” Kim said. “With fewer buyers in the market, causing inventory to accumulate, sellers may need to aggressively market. The sellers of this particular property have chosen to be creative.”

A good real estate agent can feed that creativity, said Linda Trevor, Kim’s co-worker.

“Realtors network all the time to find out what everybody’s doing and what’s working,” Trevor said. She has seen seller financing and builders making financial contributions to buy down a mortgage to a lower rate, ideas she passes along to her clients.

Builder Davis, who has sold all of his inventory except for the resale he renovated recently, is optimistic that these innovative sales ideas will produce. He owns three other lots — one in Trenton Place and two in Rose Hall — in Raleigh and plans to begin building a spec home on one of them as soon as financing comes through.

“I feel the market picking up a bit,” he said.

Nancy E. Oates is a business and real estate writer in Chapel Hill. Reach her at neoates@earthlink.net.