Some houses stand out from their neighbors in an undeniable way. They aren’t just larger or newer or painted purple; they are of a different kind entirely, like a converted church, a grass-roofed home built into a hillside, or a fanciful castle-like construction. Agents can expect challenges with the sale of such unusual homes. How do you find potential buyers who value the unique aspects of the property? Will appraisers, lenders, and insurance companies be willing to work on this sale? Where do you look for guidance if no one in your brokerage has sold a house like this before? Texas REALTORS® members shared the stories of their most unusual sales and gave their advice for agents in similar circumstances.
4 bed, 3 bath, 1 cave
In her spare time, Lori Largen, agent with JB Goodwin, REALTORS® in San Antonio, leads tours at Bracken Cave, which houses the largest bat colony in the world. “I’ve always been fascinated by caves,” Largen says. So when she had the opportunity to list a house with its own underground caverns, she was thrilled.
The 2.5-acre property is near Natural Bridge Caverns, and the home’s cave, accessed through stairs beneath a hatch in the yard, is reminiscent of its grand neighbor, on a smaller scale. The 30-foot-wide main chamber has intricate stalactites, stalagmites, and soda straws.
The sellers first suspected there was a cave under their property when they were building the house and discovered a small hole in the yard that blew air. A decade later, they excavated it with the help of cave experts. And there is more for the new owners to explore if they want to continue the work. “Under the main room there’s another cavern that they think is two or three times bigger than the largest room,” Largen says.
When listing and advertising the house, she featured the cave prominently. Soon her clients had a couple of offers.
After they accepted an offer, Largen says a popular social media account that features unusual properties discovered the listing. “After that, oh my gosh, I had so many people who wanted to buy it sight-unseen,” she says. She has a list of nearly a hundred stories and videos about the cave from all over the world.
It’s fortunate that Largen enjoys giving cave tours. “For anybody to go see the cave,” she says, “they had to sign a waiver, and I had to be the one that showed it to them. It was a lot of work,” Largen jokes, “because I’ve got bad knees.”
Aside from the whirlwind of publicity, the sale went smoothly. “The house actually is just a standard house,” Largen says. The buyers were looking for a one-story home in the area for their young family. “When they saw the cave, they just absolutely fell in love with it,” she says.
With this experience behind her, Largen says her advice to any agent with an unusual listing is to do plenty of advance advertising. And if it is truly unique, submitting it to platforms that feature unusual properties may get it in front of even more people.
Largen still marvels at how far news of her listing spread. “Right before the home closed,” she says, “my husband and I were riding a train across Ireland.” When the couple sitting across from them found out where they were from, one of them asked, “Oh, you live in Texas? Did you see that cave house?”
There’s no place like dome
If you’ve ever driven on I-35 between Waco and Dallas, you may have wondered about the huge caterpillar-shaped building just south of Waxahachie. Affectionately called Bruco, it is the workshop of the Monolithic Dome Institute, where you can take classes on how to build your own dome house.
Unlike geodesic domes, which are made up of many triangular panels, a monolithic dome is constructed by inflating a huge balloon-like Airform, spraying it with polyurethane foam, attaching rebar, and finally covering it with a sprayable form of concrete. The resulting structure is energy-efficient, resistant to severe storms, and decidedly unusual.
Angie Patton, agent at Homes By Lainie Real Estate Group, likes unusual houses—she grew up in an underground house—but she had no experience with domes before listing one near Lake Texoma. She had to learn quickly. “The people who are looking for a dome house,” Patton says, “have done their research, and they had all these technical questions for me. So, I called the Monolithic Dome Institute.”
Gary Clark, who teaches dome-building at the institute, encourages other agents to get in touch if they are in a similar situation. “Please reach out!” he says. “We can be a resource for possible comparable domes, and if there is some repair work that needs to be addressed, we could possibly assist with that as well.” The institute also publishes an email newsletter, which ran a story featuring Patton’s listing.
The home generated a lot of interest. “Everybody was curious,” Patton says. “I would have a packed house at my open houses. It was unique and fun.” Still, finding a buyer was challenging, she says, “because most people want a normal house.”
Communication was key in marketing such an unusual home. When Patton hosted open houses, she would get there early to film walkthrough videos for social media, highlighting the natural light from the dome’s windows and doors. “It was cool, because I thought that a dome house would be really dark,” she says. She also used her social channels to share photos and video emphasizing the property’s unique layout. Aerial photos that her photographer took with a drone were especially effective, she says.
Eventually, the home attracted interested buyers, but the road to closing was still bumpy. “The financing was the big deal,” Patton says. “Traditional mortgage companies couldn’t lend on it.” Finally, a local bank was willing to work with the buyer and to be more flexible with considering comps. “I was having trouble finding any dome houses that had sold recently in this area, so I called the bank and asked if I could pull two years out instead of one year and if I could go a little farther out distance-wise.” They agreed, “but it was tough,” she says.
The buyers also had trouble finding insurance. Patton thought insurance companies would like domes, because they are built to withstand hurricanes and tornadoes more effectively. But it can be difficult to find underwriting for nontraditional houses. Ultimately the buyers were able to get a policy from the company that had insured the home for the previous owners.
Despite the challenges and difficulties of the sale, Patton enjoyed the process. She encourages other agents who are listing unusual houses to stay connected to their community, reach out to experts, highlight the benefits of the home, and enjoy the creative challenge. “Who doesn’t want a unique property to market and advertise?” she says. “I would do it all over again anytime.”
Down-to-earth green home
Alyse Alonso and Jay Arbizu, both agents at eXp Realty in San Antonio, are green home enthusiasts. Through their connections in the green building world, they were referred to a client who had the greenest and most unusual house the pair had yet listed. Made primarily of dirt, with walls 18 inches thick, the rammed earth construction was made using material gathered from the lot it sits on.
“Each little striation that you see in the home is just different layers of earth that they pounded down and kept pounding and pounding,” Arbizu says. First, the builders tested the soil to see what aggregate they should mix with it. Then they laid a commercial-grade slab foundation to withstand all the compacting. After building a frame for the exterior walls, builders poured earth from the site into it and brought in a compactor machine. The compactor compressed the soil to a specified hardness, at which point the builders poured another layer and another.
“That process makes it pretty maintenance free,” Arbizu says, “because you’ll never have to paint it, if you don’t want to.” And the walls are so thick, he says, “you don’t really need a full HVAC system, because it stays cooler inside in the summers and warmer in the winters.” Plus, it’s highly resistant to storms, termites, and fire, he says.
Fire was a particular concern for the owners, because their previous home on that land burned down. They built the new one across the driveway without removing the burned-out house, which caused some consternation for the appraisers but did not ultimately get in the way of the sale.
The first challenge was price. “It was a little bit overpriced originally, and the sellers just had to come to grips with that,” Alonso says. “The house was definitely a passion project from the seller side, which always makes it a little tough because you tend to overdo it towards what you want, never thinking that you’re going to sell it.”
The next issue was how to market the house. “We have had the frustration before of selling greener homes and people not understanding the benefits in the long run,” Alonso says. The agents advertised on a website for green homes, trying to attract like-minded buyers. “And early on, it really looked like that would do it, because we were getting so much attention from that green website. And we thought the construction of the house was so cool that that might sell it,” Alonso says. They did lots of virtual tours for interested people from out of state.
Ultimately, though, what sold the house was the listing in the MLS, Alonso says. And the main selling points for the buyers were location and design rather than green features. “My sellers are from Mexico, and it’s a very traditional center-courtyard Mexican-style layout that they built,” she says. “The buyers were from Mexico, too, and had the same love for that style of layout.”
No matter how unusual it was, Arbizu says, “This house ended up being like every other house in many ways: If you price it right, you’re going to get enough eyes on it. If you get enough eyes on it, then you’re going to be able to sell it.”