Challenging Properties: Why Some Homes Require a Completely Different Strategy

LT Immobili & Design 08 August 2026

There are not simply homes that are easy to sell and homes that are difficult to sell. There are properties the market understands immediately, and others that, in order to find the right buyer, need to be interpreted, positioned and presented differently.

There is a fairly common mistake in real estate: assuming that the same strategy can work for every property.

Professional photography, exposure on the main property portals, a carefully written description, a few advertising campaigns — and then waiting for enquiries to arrive.

For many properties, this may be enough. For others, it certainly is not.

Some homes naturally meet the expectations of the market. They are in recognisable locations, offer contemporary layouts, have sought-after features and are priced within a range that buyers can easily compare with similar properties.

And then there are the others.

The ones we perhaps too easily describe as “difficult properties”.

A home is rarely difficult in absolute terms. More often, it is difficult to position within the prevailing expectations of the market.

It may be located on a lesser-known street, have a layout that belongs to another era, be on the ground floor when most buyers appear to be looking elsewhere, or require renovation work that not everyone is prepared to undertake.

In other cases, the limitation is less obvious. The property may be attractive, well maintained and genuinely interesting, yet be priced in a way that places it in direct competition with homes buyers perceive as more desirable.

And this is where the real difficulty begins.

Not necessarily with the quality of the property itself, but with the distance between what the home offers and what the market expects to find at that price.

When that distance becomes too great, simply increasing advertising rarely solves the problem.

When a property comes onto the market and enquiries are slower than expected, the instinctive response is often to increase its visibility.

More portals, more advertising, more photographs, perhaps a few changes to the description.

But visibility does not correct a positioning problem.

In some cases, it can actually make it more apparent.

A property may receive thousands of online views and very few viewings. It may generate numerous enquiries that never turn into appointments. Even more telling are those homes that are viewed repeatedly without anyone ever coming close to making an offer.

These are different signals, but they often tell the same story: the market is seeing the property; it simply isn’t choosing it.

At that point, the question should no longer be simply, “How can we make more people see it?” but rather, “Are we showing it to the right people, and are we presenting it in the right way?”

One of the most misleading assumptions in residential property sales is that a home should appeal to as many people as possible.

That is not necessarily true.

A property with broadly desirable characteristics can certainly be marketed to a wide audience. But when a home has more distinctive features, indiscriminately widening the audience can be less effective than narrowing it.

A ground-floor home with substantial outdoor space, for example, may hold little appeal for someone who considers the light and outlook of an upper floor essential. Yet it may be considerably more attractive to a buyer looking for a natural connection between indoor and outdoor living, easier access or a home particularly suited to life with pets.

A less contemporary internal layout may be a drawback for one buyer and an opportunity for another who wants the freedom to redesign the spaces entirely.

The strategy changes when we stop asking why a property does not appeal to everyone and start asking who it might genuinely appeal to.

There is another particularly delicate aspect to consider.

When a property has a potentially disadvantageous characteristic, there can be a temptation to minimise it in the marketing. It is understandable, but rarely effective.

The buyer will discover it anyway.

They may notice it on the floor plan, during the viewing, when reviewing the documentation or simply when they walk through the front door.

Effective property marketing is not about turning a limitation into something it is not. It is about giving potential buyers the right context in which to understand that characteristic as part of the property as a whole.

A less prominent location may mean the property is harder to find, but it may also offer greater privacy. A house requiring renovation involves an additional investment, but can offer a degree of creative freedom that a newly refurbished home cannot. A ground-floor apartment has fundamentally different qualities from a penthouse: attempting to market both in the same way would make little sense.

Credibility comes from maintaining this balance.

It may sound paradoxical, but one of the effects of successfully repositioning a property is often a reduction in the number of viewings.

And that can be a very good sign.

We have worked with properties that initially appeared to be attracting a satisfactory level of interest: plenty of online views, enquiries and occasional appointments. The problem was what happened afterwards.

Nothing.

In one such case, a ground-floor property on a quieter internal street, with a layout that was no longer particularly contemporary, continued to be marketed through characteristics that were simply too generic.

We changed the perspective.

The target audience was redefined, the communication became more selective, and the outdoor spaces were given a central role in the way the property was presented.

The number of viewings fell.

But the people coming through the door were far more relevant.

And an offer followed.

This is one of the less intuitive aspects of our profession: the objective is not necessarily to bring more people into a property. It is to increase the likelihood that the right people walk through the door.

There is, of course, one variable that no amount of storytelling can ignore: price.

Property marketing can improve how a home is perceived, highlight qualities that may otherwise be overlooked and reach a more appropriate audience. But it cannot artificially create a value that the market does not recognise.

In fact, the more selective a property’s characteristics are, the more important its price positioning becomes.

Because buyers will inevitably compare.

And if the same budget gives them access to alternatives that better satisfy their priorities, their decision becomes fairly predictable.

This is why valuing a more complex property should never be reduced to a simple comparison of price per square metre. It is necessary to understand the property’s genuine pool of potential buyers and, just as importantly, what else those buyers could purchase with the same budget at that particular moment.

It is a subtle distinction, but a fundamental one.

More complex properties have an interesting quality: they force us to think.

They leave little room for shortcuts.

They require an analysis of price, audience, competition, presentation and documentation — even the way in which a viewing is organised can make a difference.

Sometimes the property itself needs attention. Sometimes the communication does. In other cases, it is the price. Very often, several elements need to be reconsidered together.

And this is perhaps the central point: a difficult property does not necessarily need more marketing. It needs more precise marketing.

In our work, properties that are less immediately understood by the market are often among the most professionally interesting.

Because they prevent us from relying on routine.

They require us to look at a property through the eyes of the market, to understand its limitations without allowing those limitations to define it and, above all, to identify what could make it genuinely desirable to a specific audience.

We do not believe every home should be presented in the same way, because every property enters the market with a different story, a different audience and different competition.

And it is precisely when a property appears more difficult to sell that strategy stops being a detail.

It becomes part of the sale itself.

Because, ultimately, there is a substantial difference between putting a property on the market and creating the conditions for the market to choose it.