Is Exchange with Owner Loan Possible?

[Dan Strohfus]

Wife and I have greatly appreciated real estate in CA and I'm trying to plan our next steps.  If we sold our home, we'd have roughly $800K in cap gains, so I'm interested in the idea of making it a rental for a while then exchanging it and taking the $500k exclusion at that time.  To get to that deal, we'd need to move out first.  We have no loan on this house.

We've had rental properties that have gained as well and with rents increased over the years and loans paid down or off, I'd like to get more rental assets to depreciate since each year we're paying more tax on rental income. 

One rental I've selected to work with first looks like this:  Purchased about 20 years ago for $120K and is now worth $400k.  It has no loan and has been a rental the whole time and we have depreciated $70-some k range.  Obviously, we want to exchange this property and not realize the gain.

I found an interesting property that I wouldn't mind living in.  Asking $850k.  It's a ranch with 2 houses that also has income from renting out pasture and barn space for horses.

My question is, could we get a owner occupied loan for $500 -510K and have all the exchange funds ~$360k be the down payment and cover the transaction costs?  We could continue to rent out the pasture and barn and 1 of the houses.  So, we could move in sooner than some other property that we'd need to season as a rental.  I guess the question for the lender is, do they care if this is an exchange deal?

Even though I'm not an active poster here, I really appreciate the community.