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It's not easy to sell your home these days, but it's not all that easy to buy, either. Here's the problem in a nutshell: There's an excess of homes on the market, but the buyers who normally would be scooping them up (because of falling prices and low interest rates) can't get financing because the lenders have tightened the rules on whom they'll lend money to.

If stressed-out sellers and hard-to-qualify buyers could just join forces, they could both achieve their goals. The answer may lie in what's commonly called "creative financing."

"This is the time to get creative," affirms real estate expert Wendy Patton, co-author of "Making Hard Cash in a Soft Real Estate Market."

"If you really want to sell your home, you need to expand your pool of buyers to include those people who want to buy a home but can't qualify for a standard mortgage at this time. This pool is actually much, much larger than the pool of buyers who can get a mortgage right now."

Ready to get creative about financing to entice buyers? There are three major options:

● See if your lender will allow a mortgage assumption.

● Help a buyer build a down payment through a lease-to-own deal.

● If you've got the equity, offer financing yourself.

With a mortgage assumption, the buyer takes over payments on an existing mortgage. While banks have traditionally not allowed assumable mortgages and some mortgage experts don't see that changing — especially on 30-year fixed-rate loans — others are seeing some cases of it.

"But given the challenged market conditions many areas are experiencing, this may be negotiable with the lender," Patton said.

The lender would often rather allow the loan to be assumed than foreclose on the property, noted Jason R. Hanson, a real estate investor.

A second type of creative financing is the lease-to-own deal, in which the buyer acts as tenant for a set period (usually one to three years), with some of the rent getting socked away in an account to be applied toward a down payment. In a lease-option situation, the buyer can choose not to buy at the end of the option period but would generally lose that built-up cash. With a lease-purchase, the buyer must buy the house in the end.

Yes, these deals are risky.

"Lease-purchases are hairy-scary to me, because you still may have the buyer walk (and) the seller is still the owner," said Janice B. Leis, a Prudential Realtor covering several Eastern states. "Usually both sides are too cheap to hire a real estate attorney." Sellers need to avoid legal entanglements that may create a financial wrangle for them down the road, Leis said.

Real estate entrepreneur Bobby Wallace compares lease-to-own deals to "selling someone a home with training wheels." His suggestion for sellers: Do "everything in your power to make the buyer truly realize that this is a tremendous opportunity to enhance their credit and not waste it."

Another creative strategy is to go the seller-financing route. There are two ways to go: full and partial.

With full financing, the seller acts as the lender for the total amount owed after down payment. This is typically the arrangement in such agreements as land contracts, trust deeds, contracts for deed, deeds of trust, notes and privately held mortgages.

With full financing, the deed may be passed along to the buyer upfront or once the contract is paid in full. Two potential buyer types, Patton said, are people who have relocated but not yet sold their old home (meaning they can't yet qualify for the mortgage) and those going through divorce whose existing home is tied up in the proceedings.

With partial financing, the seller provides a portion of the money, typically in the form of seller carry-backs, seller holdbacks or second mortgages. In an example of a seller carry-back, the bank would lend 80 percent of the purchase price, the buyer would contribute a 10 percent down payment, and the seller would lend the remaining 10 percent.

But would you want to become a lender? Say the buyer's payments stop. Unlike with a landlord relationship, you can't simply evict, Patton said. "You will either need to follow forfeiture procedures or foreclosure procedures, both of which cost more in time and money than a standard eviction."