VIDEO BLOG
How do you talk to a seller about price when their property is unlike anything else in town?
I recently faced that question with a 17-bedroom former orphanage on more than 24 acres. After it went unsold at auction, we shifted to a traditional listing. The sellers were considering offering the home with less acreage, so I pulled sales data from the town and three surrounding-area counties, including the county where the property sits.
Only one home in town had ever sold above $650,000. Across the three counties, just three homes on five acres or less had ever sold above $700,000. None had sold at that level in the previous 12 months.
Those numbers gave us a starting point for an honest conversation. When nearby comps are scarce, widen your search. For a one-of-a-kind property, you can also estimate what the land would sell for on its own, then look at what it would cost to rebuild or what similarly sized homes have sold for elsewhere.
Bring a simple visual that shows what sold, where it sold, and when. Then explain how those sales inform your recommendation. A seller may still want to aim higher, but they’ll understand what the market has supported and what they’re asking the next buyer to pay.
