If designing and building an accessible home sounds like too much work, you can always seek out the accessible home of your dreams on the real estate market. As a wheelchair user and realtor himself, Kip Johnson has worked with numerous clients with exactly that plan — and he has learned to be the bearer of bad news.

“I see people who think they’re going to find that perfect accessible house, and I have to tell them that it’s just not out there,” says Johnson, a C5 quad. “For somebody to find an accessible house that’s in their budget with all the features that they want is next to impossible.”

James Lee, another realtor who is also a C5 quad, has a more whimsical take: “Perfect accessible houses are unicorns.” Lee, Johnson and other wheelchair-using realtors we spoke with agree that understanding this is the first step to actually finding a home that works for your individual access needs.

Rare and Mislabeled

To make a point about how rare it is that truly accessible homes come on the market, Lee brings up a recent search he ran for a client seeking a rental property that would work for a wheelchair user. His initial search in the desired area turned up around 1,600 properties. When he narrowed that to “wheelchair accessible” properties, only 600 remained, with the vast majority of those not even coming close to actually offering what a full-time wheelchair user would need. “And that’s looking at rentals,” he says. “The market for sales is even drearier.”

The discrepancy between properties listed as “wheelchair accessible” and ones that will actually work for full-time wheelchair users is a widespread problem. “One of the biggest problems our [multiple listing service] system has with accessibility is that other agents label things accessible, but they have no idea what the ADA standards are,” says Johnson. “I’ll see a listing that says it has a roll-in shower, and then when I actually see the shower, it has a 6-inch curb. That’s not a roll-in shower, and that’s not going to work for anyone who needs one.”

The ability to see through bogus listings and understand clients’ needs is one of the reasons Johnson encourages fellow wheelers to seek out a realtor who uses a wheelchair when possible. “We’re going to see things that other agents won’t have any idea about,” he says.

Lee hasn’t had a wheelchair-using client since he was paralyzed eight years ago, but he agrees that there are advantages wheelchair-using realtors bring. Lived experience, visibility and connections are high atop the list. “I believe in that 80/20 rule: 20% of the agents produce 80% of the results,” explains Lee. “Being positioned in that 20% and being known as a wheelchair user certainly helps with getting information through networking. It’s a significant advantage.”

A realtor from another state recently reached out after hearing Lee talk on a real estate podcast. She gave him the scoop on a completely ADA accessible home that had not come on the market yet, right in his territory. “That’s the type of advantage and information that you want and need to get out of your real estate agent,” he adds.

Asking the Right Questions

Intrinsically understanding that accessible means different things to different people — and knowing the right questions to figure out what that may be — is also a critical skill for any realtor working with a wheelchair user.

Even though he uses a wheelchair, Barry Long was caught off guard when one wheelchair-using client said he was looking for a three-story home. The client explained that the third floor was for his caregivers and mother when they weren’t helping him. The bottom floor was for laundry and SCI equipment and “everything that I’m not going to use anyway because I’m a quad,” and the main floor was his.

“I remember looking at him and thinking that’s brilliant,” says Long, a T5 para who works in residential and commercial real estate for Sotheby’s International Realty. “I never thought about a three-story house for a quadriplegic, but it totally makes sense.”

Long urges clients to view possible homes through three lenses: accessible, adaptable and visitable.  Accessible means the house is adapted and ready for that certain individual’s needs. Adaptable means the building has the potential to fill a client’s needs with remodeling. “Visitable is like my dad’s place,” he says. “He wants me to be able to get in with my wheelchair. I can wander around his house, I can get into the bathroom and the living area and watch TV, but the bedrooms are all upstairs because he doesn’t really want me to stay — he wants me to visit.”

All three real estate agents pride themselves on being able to identify the adaptable gems that sometimes fly under the radar. “I think the biggest thing about looking for the house if you’re in a chair is not getting hung up on trying to find the perfect house,” says Johnson. “You need to be able to look at a house that is structurally sound and see if you can turn it into what you want.”

As for whether you need a realtor who uses a wheelchair to find a good home, Lee says no, not necessarily. “The idea that I would have an advantage over a nondisabled agent representing somebody in a wheelchair could be a misconception,” he says. “But as long as you’re dealing with a competent wheelchair user who knows the business … it couldn’t hurt.”