Selling a Unique or Unusual Property

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From windmills to country estates, former prisons and more, there’s a long list of properties that buyers will consider to be unique or unusual because of their style, location, history and more. This guide explains the challenges and legal conveyancing difficulties you could face with trying to sell this type of home, and it also provides advice on steps to make getting a competitive and fast offer more achievable.

1. Which properties are considered to be unique or unusual?
2. Challenges you may face with trying to sell an unusual or unique home
3. Factors that could assist the sale of your unique/unusual property
4. Ways to make your unusual or unique property more appealing to buyers
5. Four options to sell your unusual/unique home
6. Top questions and answers about selling a unique or unusual property

Which properties are considered to be unique or unusual?

Of the millions of leasehold and freehold properties located throughout the UK, a good number are considered to be unique or unusual. There’s no single government rule or law specifying which homes fit in this category, but there are certain aspects that lead to this designation.
These quirks of design or other factors help to make your property be considered one-of-a-kind. Some elements that may make your property be considered unique/unusual include:

• An unusual location
• Lack of certain features
• Excess of other features
• One-off architecture
• Historic buildings
• Unconventional aspects

By way of example, property sales website Zoopla recently published a list of 10 properties for sale that it considers unusual. It includes a Tudor gatehouse, former churches, flats located within converted prison space, the grounds of a ruined castle, and other varied properties.
Regardless of the explanations for why your home is considered unique, you should be aware of the pros and cons associated with trying to find a buyer when you are ready to sell it.
You might have bought the home originally because you found it more appealing because it was unusual but now need to sell because you want to use the funds to purchase your next home, or perhaps you inherited the property and want to sell it. Whatever the reason you have for selling, this guide walks you through the process and offers advice on boosting your odds of getting a fair and fast offer.

Challenges you may face with trying to sell an unusual or unique home

Although you might greatly enjoy the one-off nature of living in a unique or unusual property, you may experience some problems with attempt to sell it quickly. That’s because certain buyers might view your property negatively for one or more of the below reasons.
High price: Some unique properties can be very expensive, for examples palatial country estates originally built centuries again for lords and others, as highlighted by The Week. These homes are often listed for a least a million pounds, which will reduce the number of available buyers who can afford it, unless you are willing to greatly lower your asking price.
Building restrictions: A great number of historic, listed buildings are deemed to be unique or unusual, and a listing also means that there are a range of restrictions that can apply to any future construction work, like an extension, that the owner can pursue at the property. If your home is listed then this might cause some buyers to lose interest, if one of their main reasons for being interested in the property was the potential for launching a construction project.
Design concerns: The very design elements that make your property unique could also be a turn-off for many buyers, for example if you live in a former windmill where then interior has an unusual layout because it was adapted to the building’s shape, this might be reason enough for some people to lose interest in the property. The same applies for almost any unique design factor that may appeal to some people but discourages a larger number of buyers.

Factors that could assist the sale of your unique/unusual property

Although there can be some additional hurdles involved with selling a property that is considered to be unusual or unique, there are also some explanations for why a buyer might look more favourably on this type of home and be more open to making an offer.
Some of the justifications below could make a potential buyer view your property as more valuable, which might help with getting a higher sale price and therefore hopefully giving you more profit. Other factors may not affect the perceived value of the home but could still be draw for certain buyers.
One-of-a-kind status: Highly unique properties like windmills, former prisons, converted churches and more are the definition of one-of-a-kind and can be very appealing to buyers that want to own a home that truly stands out from the crowd. You could find that there is a committed group of prospective buyers specifically looking for your type of unique or unusual property, even if this category of buyers might be smaller than for conventional homes,
Listed building: Your property may be a listed building because it is unique, like a Grade II-listed former church highlighted on the Property Divas website. Although this can sometimes be a factor explaining why buyers may not want your property, other buyers could place a priority on owning a listed building and therefore be more likely to make an offer on your home.

Ways to make your unusual or unique property more appealing to buyers

If you have a unique or unusual home to sell, there are a few different strategies that might be available in order to make the property more appealing to potential buyers.
As an example, if your unique property is considered dilapidated then you could decide to invest in extensive repairs before trying to sell it. This would prevent a situation where a buyer wants to own your home but significantly reduces their offer by the amount of money that the expect it would cost to bring the property back to a habitable condition as the next owner.
But this could be a very lengthy and expensive choice depending on the scale of the work required at your home, which is not ideal if you want to sell fast and at minimal cost.
If that’s your situation, you could reach out to LDN Properties are another quick home buying company, because they are used to making rapid and competitive offers to purchase unique and unusual properties of any age, condition, location, size, shape or type – even those that might have wide-ranging physical defects or other problems that make many buyers lose interest.
Beyond spending lots of time and money on large-scale repairs to a home, there are some low-cost or no-cost options that could also make your unique/unusual property more enticing.
These include cleaning up all the rooms inside the home and removing any clutter, in order to make the property look as spacious and valuable as possible. You can pursue similar work for the exterior of the home, fixing any missing roof tiles, mowing the garden and more.
Although these steps sound dimple, they can have an outsized impact on how buyers view your property, because homes that seem well-maintained are more likely to attract offers.

Four options to sell your unusual/unique home

You will usually be able to choose from selling your property to a quick buyer, selling via an estate agent, selling at an auction or selling on your own. You’ll see from the details about the four methods below that they each have their own advantages and disadvantages.
Quick buyers like LDN Properties, for example, will never charge you any commission, which means that you can lower your expenses and count on receiving the full sale proceeds. But estate agents and auctioneers will make you pay commission, and these two methods can also often take many more months to complete compared to selling to a quick buyer.
You should note down your main goals with selling, including how fast you want to sell, your ideal selling price and whether you can accept paying any commission. Then compare these aims against the specific information about the four options below, and this should help greatly in narrowing the choices down to the selling method that best pairs with your needs.

Selling to a quick buyer

Selling via an estate agent

Another choice for selling your unique/unusual home is using the services of an estate agent. They’ll create a listing that features photographs of your property and describes its main features, then they’ll advertise this online, in their office and in local newspapers, followed by scheduling viewings so buyers can tour the home, and finally fielding serious offers.
It’s a large amount of work and in exchange for doing this, the average estate agent will charge you between 1.15 percent and 1.40 percent in commission, which will be deducted immediately from the sale proceeds, adding to your expenses. If you want to keep your costs as low as possible when selling your property, you might want to review some of the other options.
This can also be quite a slow way to sell a home – particularly one that is considered unique or unusual, and you should not be surprised if it takes more than a year to find a buyer.
Note also that even if someone makes a serious offer to purchase your home, they could rescind it soon after. This would cause the sale to fall apart and force you to restart the search for a buyer, extending your selling timeline by potentially many months. And there’s nothing you can do to penalise someone for taking back an offer if the contracts are not yet exchanged.
Beware also that certain estate agents might specialise in only selling commonly found homes, like conventional flats or semi-detached houses. They may have little to no experience with selling your unique or unusual type of property, and this suggests that the estate agent won’t know to market the home in order to get potential buyers interested. Ask companies if they’ve sold a home like yours before and avoid selling to those that lack this experience.

Selling at an auction

You are taking a gamble when selling your unusual/unique home at a property auction because there is no guarantee anyone will bid on it, and if that outcome happens then the home does not sell and you’ll need to try again with finding a buyer, delaying the selling schedule further.
Or you might just get a single bid on your property at the reserve price – the lowest price at which you agree your home can sell. This is considered a binding sale that the bidder could sue you to enforce if you try to walk away from it after the auction. For that reason, you need to calculate a reserve price that should produce a profit even after you pay the auctioneer’s fees.
Many auctioneers will charge their commission at about 2.5 percent of your home’s sale price, and this will increase your costs because it will be deducted right away from the proceeds. You might be able to negotiate a reduced commission with some auctioneers or have them charge the buyer for some of your costs, so ask them whether these could be viable options.
Some auctioneers, like Clive Emson, will have experience with selling unique or unusual properties. But beware that other auction houses might never have sold a home like yours, and this implies that they will struggled to generate interest in your property from buyers, making it harder to sell. Always ask auctioneers about their track records with selling a home like yours.
This is far from the speediest way to sell your property and it could take several months, with a few long waiting periods involved. You’ll have many weeks or more to wait between deciding to sell this way and the auction taking place, and then if you property does sell, the buyer will often have about a month to finish their tasks to complete the sale, like signing legal documents.
You could inquire with auctioneers about whether they could speed up the sale by reducing the time given to the buyer for these tasks, but some may allow them even more than a month. If you want a faster sale then you should review other options, like selling to a quick buyer where the entire timeline, including exchange of contracts, should only be a matter of weeks.

Selling on your own

Or you could attempt to sell the property without any assistance, and this will put the burden on you to handle all the require steps, from initially creating and advertising a listing through to scheduling viewings, hearing offers and hopefully taking one to a completed sale.
It’s a large amount of work and can quickly become very stressful and take up a lot of your time, and you should only consider this if you have successfully sold an unusual/unique property before, or you have a qualified family member or friend who can help for free with the sale. Without that experience, it could take more than a full year before you are able to sell.
And a buyer can always make an offer but then change their mind and walk away from the sale, and they can do this without facing any penalties if you have not yet exchanged contracts. You will need to start over with seeking a buyer if this happens, creating even more delay.
The only obvious benefit of selling without any help is that you won’t need to pay any third party commission for finding a buyer for the property, which lowers your costs. But this saving might be cancelled out by the funds that you have to spend on your listing and other steps.
One way to achieve not only a zero-fee sale but also a fast one is to instead get in touch with a quick home buyer like LDN Properties. These companies commit to never charge sellers any commission and the added bonus of being able to complete the process of buying almost any type of property within weeks, making them a much swifter alternative to selling on your own.

Top queries and answers about selling a unique or unusual property

When it is time to sell your home, you may have some questions to ask us before deciding how to sell, ranging from the areas we can buy property through to the size of houses. Here are some of the top questions you can ask us about selling an unusual or unique property:

Your top questions when selling a unique or unusual property