CASE STUDY · KELOWNA

Downsizing out of a house you built yourself

Accepted offer in two days. Firm 20 days after listing, with no price reduction.

Front entry of a one-storey stucco home with a glass-panel door and transom, wide exposed-aggregate steps, tall stacked windows beside a stone column and basement windows at grade. The detached garage, in matching yellow stucco with brown trim, stands behind the horizontal wood fence.

The situation

Lorraine was leaving a home she had built herself. A custom rancher with a basement, over 2,500 square feet. Separate basement entrance with suite potential, an attached garage plus a second detached double.

Two things make a sale like this harder than the square footage suggests.

The first is emotional and nobody should pretend otherwise. Selling a house you designed is not the same transaction as selling a house you bought. Every choice in it was made with care for a particular way of living, and the job is to find the buyer who wants to live that way too.

The second is mechanical. A custom home is not a comparables problem. It’s a matching problem.

Why averaging the neighbourhood would have been wrong

Here is the trap with a house like this.

You pull the comparable sales, you average them, you land on a number that reflects what a typical home of that size in that area does. It looks defensible. It’s on paper. And it is quietly wrong, because a second detached double garage and a suite-ready basement barely move a neighbourhood average.

They do not barely move the small group of buyers who need them.

For the tradesperson with equipment, the family running a business out of the house, the buyer whose plan depends on rental income from the lower level, those two features are not a bonus. They are the entire reason to write an offer, and the rest of the house is what they tolerate to get them.

Price a house like that to the average and you sit. You sit because the buyers who’d pay for the features never see themselves in the listing, and the buyers who would pay the average don’t want what you’re selling.

What we did instead

Positioned it to the people the features were built for. The marketing led with the second garage, the separate entrance and the layout, rather than treating them as bullet points after the countertops.

Priced to that buyer, not to the street. With the explicit understanding that this narrows the pool. A smaller pool that actually wants your house beats a larger one that’s indifferent to it, every time.

Went in expecting to find out fast. That’s the honest trade on a narrow-pool strategy: if the right buyer is in the market right now, you find out quickly. If they aren’t, you find that out quickly too, which is its own useful information and much better learned in week two than month five.

They were in the market. The offer was accepted two days after it went live, and subjects came off 20 days after listing. The asking price was never reduced.

If you’re downsizing out of something you built

Ask yourself which features of your house were built for you specifically. Those are usually the ones a comparables grid undervalues and a matched buyer overpays for.

Then be realistic that the buyer pool is smaller. That’s fine. You only need one, and the strategy is about finding that one rather than appealing weakly to everybody.

How I approach a listing · What clients say

Kitchen with a long quartz island and three brown leather stools, grey shaker cabinets, a French-door stainless fridge, a gas range under a stainless chimney hood, white tile backsplash and three glass pendant lights. Clerestory windows look out to a hillside with houses.
Living room with a high ceiling and tall windows topped by transoms, two grey armchairs, two brown sofas, a wood coffee table and a wood bookcase, with the top of the stair railing in the corner.
Entry with a white front door with a frosted glass panel and a clear sidelight, a grey ottoman on a geometric rug, and an open stairwell with dark wood and metal-spindle railings leading down to the lower level.
Lower-level family room with a linear gas fireplace under a dark wood mantel, high windows near the ceiling, a sofa, a leather recliner and ottoman, and a television on a wood stand, with carpet and pot lights.
Inside the detached double garage, set up as a workshop: a wide white overhead door with an opener, ceiling heater, white cabinets and counters along the side wall, a table saw, a mitre saw and a drill press.
Street side of the home in grey and yellow stucco with a skillion roofline, a single-car attached garage with a column of small windows between stacked stone pillars, a concrete driveway and a trimmed lawn.
Front of a modern rancher in yellow and grey stucco with a flat overhanging roof, a large brown-framed window wall split by a stacked stone column, a vertical strip of windows, a wood-clad entry with a small Canadian flag, concrete steps, basement windows at grade, evergreen shrubs, a front lawn and a horizontal wood fence.