Selling a Unique Home: Turning Quirks Into Perks

Selling a unique home goes best when the listing leads with what makes it unusual and answers the question each quirk raises for a buyer. Quirks turn into perks when the photos and plans show them plainly, the listing explains what each one means for the owner, and the price comes from sales of homes that really compare, even if they are some distance away.

Why an Unusual Home Is Worth Leading With

Not every property fits the usual mould. A castle, a converted school, a brutalist house among semis or a home with its own airstrip can't be sold with the photos and wording that sell an ordinary three-bedroom house. For an agent, that makes such a home an opportunity: sell one well and you have something to show that most of your competitors don't.

The sale also brings the next one. Owners of similar homes face the problems you will already have solved, from showing a room nobody else has to pricing a house with nothing like it nearby, so the sale can bring you sellers looking for an agent who has dealt with them before. Each unusual home you present well also shows buyers what living in one is like, which can widen the circle of people who would consider the next.

Unusual homes come in three kinds, and each raises a question of its own in a buyer's mind, which the listing should answer early.

Three Quirks and the Question Each Raises

A Historic Building and What a Buyer Can Change

Some homes stand out because of their past: a castle, an old mill or factory, a school turned into a home, or a building with a place in the community's history. Such homes often have features newer ones lack and can offer a way of life some buyers have been looking for. They also bring challenges, and one a buyer raises early is what they would be allowed to change.

Find out the building's status before the listing goes live and say it. In England, a listed building needs listed building consent for any alteration or extension that would affect its character. In the US, listing in the National Register of Historic Places puts no federal limits on what a private owner does with the home, though state or local preservation rules may. Said in the listing, the status is part of the home's story from the first viewing, and a buyer doesn't have to discover it after making an offer.

An Unusual Style and Whether It Feels Like Home

Architecture can make a home unusual too. An art deco villa, a brutalist house or a modernist one looks unlike the houses around it, and each style has a history behind it. Learning that history gives you the words to show buyers what is beautiful about a style they may never have considered.

Explore the virtual tour of one unusual home to see the rooms the way a buyer moves through them.

The buyer's question here is practical: will rooms shaped by the style work for everyday life? Photos carry much of the answer, and buyers lean on them. In NAR's 2025 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report, 83% of US buyers who searched online rated photos very useful. Rooms of an odd shape, or ones that connect in an unexpected order, need more than photos, because a picture shows one room at a time. A floor plan shows how the rooms fit together and how large each one is, which helps a buyer picture living there before a visit, and 57% of the same buyers rated floor plans very useful.

A Rare Feature and What Else It Could Be

Then there are the features that set a home apart: an indoor pool, a home theatre, a private airstrip. Put them first among the photos, where they draw people to the listing.

A feature only some buyers want raises a different question: what else could it be? Not every buyer owns a plane, but the land beside an airstrip might take an extension, another building or a field to farm. Pointing that out widens the audience beyond the few who want the feature itself. Before you suggest a use, check that the land may be put to it, so the listing doesn't promise what a planning office would refuse.

If a picture shows that potential, say so. A room virtually staged as something it isn't yet is a digitally altered photo, so label it and keep the original beside it, since MLS photo rules differ on exactly how.

Pricing a Home With Few Comparables

The price of an unusual home starts with research. Look at recent sales of similar local homes and, beyond them, sales of other unusual homes like this one, then bring the two together into a fair market value. Price too low and the seller loses what the quirks are worth; price too high and buyers won't look at it in the first place.

In the US, the appraiser sent by a buyer's lender faces the same problem. Fannie Mae's guidance on comparable sales, for the loans it buys, asks for sales similar in site, room count, size, style and condition. Where the nature of a home leaves too few truly comparable sales nearby, the appraiser may look in a wider area, use older sales, or use homes that aren't truly comparable, and has to explain why. Your own research can follow the same path, noting why you chose each sale, so you can show how you reached the price when the appraisal comes in.

If the home doesn't sell, the price conversation starts from the evidence you gathered at the start.

A Sale That Brings the Next Unusual Listing

Once it sells, the home is proof of what you can do. Give these homes a section of their own on your website, so they don't get lost among the rest, and write up each sale: why you took it on, what made it hard and how you got past it, what the buyer loved and what persuaded them, with a link to the sale where you can.

The same photos and tour work on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, where a home unlike its neighbours gives you something to post besides another listing. These platforms suit a lighter, more personal tone than a listing does, so a post can enjoy the oddity of a home as much as admire it.

Talk about them in person as well. At industry events, on a panel or at a mixer, swapping stories of unusual sales with other agents shows you how they solved problems you will meet next, and puts you in front of people who may send the next unusual home your way.

Every Quirk Named, Measured and Labelled

A turret room or a converted schoolroom only reads as a perk if every part of the listing calls it the same thing. On Giraffe360 floor plans you rename the room once and the tour picks up the name, and a curved or angled room can show its area, which says more about it than the length of its walls. The virtual tour can open facing the feature itself, with a note pinned beside it, the year the mill was converted or what the turret room is used for, so a buyer meets the quirk before anything else. On the property website, the most unusual room can lead the gallery.

Where a room's potential needs showing, virtual staging furnishes it. Check the result, since AI can change more of the room than you asked, and mark the photo Digitally Altered so nobody mistakes it for the room as it stands.