It almost sounds like a fairy tale — but when it happens, it’s deeply satisfying, and the outcome is more optimal for everyone.
Mr. Radu, official greeter of unicorn sales — a reminder that the best ones do feel a little like fairy tales.
They say real estate is a relationship business. Lately, in the most competitive corners of the market, it can feel like the opposite — more of a numbers game, an auction. Probate and trust sales often arrive that way by design: the facts, the offer terms, the price. Highest accepted wins.
And it makes sense that they do. A probate or trust sale typically means the owner has passed away, and the people now selling — the heirs, beneficiaries, or successors in interest — often have no real connection to the property. They’re seeing it as capital, not as a home. Court-confirmation sales are designed around that reality most explicitly of all: the structure exists to convert the asset into money, fairly and transparently, on behalf of an estate.
That isn’t always how it ends, of course. I’ve handled plenty of probate and trust sales where the heirs or successors in interest genuinely cared who would buy the property — and chose on factors beyond the financial. It’s one reason I still believe in submitting a buyer letter when the moment calls for it.
Used carefully and within fair housing law, a thoughtful buyer letter can give a seller something the offer paperwork can't — a sense of who the next owner will be. It doesn't replace strong terms, and it isn't appropriate in every situation. But when it fits, it can matter. What I really want to talk about, though, is the rarer thing. The sale where it all seems to have lined up — where the circumstances feel almost predestined. I call them unicorn sales, because, rightly or wrongly, there are so few of them.
A unicorn sale is what happens when the biographies and circumstances of the seller and the buyer align just right — or as close to it as possible. The priorities on both sides of the transaction are simply different from the market’s defaults.
The seller may not have improved the property to be catalog perfect. They may not have made the choices that score well with the broadest pool of buyers. Instead, they cared about something else — how the house lived over the long run, the unconventional decisions that, to the right person, read as shrewd, clever, or rare.
“When that seller meets that buyer, the dynamic of the sale changes. It stops being an auction. It becomes a relationship.”
I should say — “meets” is mostly figurative out here. Unlike the East Coast, where buyer and seller often sit across from each other at the closing table, in San Francisco the process is more informal — and, in its own way, more impersonal. The two parties may never meet at all. To each other, they’re often just names on a page. I’ve brokered transactions like that with great success: the resonance was real, even when the handshake never happened.
There are other times when they should meet, or when I wish they had. And there are moments where you realize the buyer is almost a mirror image of the seller as the seller was when they first bought the home — lifelong pen pals who’d never been introduced. When the resonances stack up like that, the goodwill in a transaction multiplies. It carries a different feel from an ordinary sale — warmer, less transactional, more durable on both sides of the closing.
Finding these matches is harder than it sounds. It means finding buyers who can see the longer-term perspective — who can look at an unconventional choice and understand why it was made. It means listening for the real priorities on both sides, not the stated ones, and very often unearthing them from people who haven’t fully articulated them even to themselves.
The truth is, all transactions are ultimately relationship-based — some just feel better than others. Unicorn sales are the ones I find genuinely rewarding and satisfying. They’re a nice departure from the marketplace as it usually runs. And the ideal, of course, is when the lucrative transactions and the personally meaningful ones happen to be the same transaction.
If you’re a seller whose home took an unconventional path, or a buyer who can see what others miss — I’d be glad to talk.