Real Estate and Design  

pt2
This sounds like mastering the obvious, but it is actually a very powerful (and assumed) first principle of deductive logic that allows us to make a lot of fairly reliable estimates about what human beings will do regarding pricing real estate.
Of course in real estate, there can be no two totally identical properties, because no two properties can occupy exactly the same location.
So appraisers try to find sales of the most comparable properties they can and "adjust" them for price differences that their comparable sales suggest exist.
For the sake of discussion, let's say sales price per square foot might indicate that people pay about the same price per square foot for all comparable collectible house sales that are with in a few hundred total square feet of floor area in size. This suggests that buyers are buying Wright houses, more than the specifics of any particular Wright house. So, an appraiser might estimate that the price of the property being appraised is the same price/square foot as the comparable sales, because the size of the property being appraised is within the range of the sizes of the house sales surveyed.
The principle of substitution is assumed to be at work both in the minds of the buyers and is in fact used in the method of the appraiser.
And if you stop and think about how you make buying choices, it is hard to say you do not at least compare properties and would substitute an equivalent one with another for approximately the same price. One always compares one thing with another in buying. Even if one says: this Wright house is utterly unique even among Wright houses, then you are saying I am trying to substitute and can't find anything to substitute to make it make sense.

pt3
This sort of appraisal is not an inductive method. It is not a parametric statistical inference, because the N's are always too small and the distribution of the population of comparable sales is never known. But it is also not a pie in the sky guess. The methodology is a specific varitety of deductive inference called praxeology (what the Austrian Economists who thought it up early in the last century liked to call it). Praxeology assumes first principles of logic operating in a human mind to make choices(this is the deductive part) and then goes out and seeks evidence resulting from that logic (the praxis part). Praxeology is the science of logics of human choice and using those logics and the events they trigger to estimate what would occur if an event (say a sale in real estate) were to occur. It has often been ridiculed as a dubious method, but no theoretician in ANY field has ever come up with a more accurate AND cost effective way of estimating what a property may sell for. ALL valuations of all real estate are fundamentally underpinned by a praxeological method utiltizing to one extent or another the principle of substitution. Some try to dress it up with statistically significant inferences (though they steadfastly refuse to inform folks that the assumptions of the regression models are always violated and so are NOT statistically significant), but it is always a praxeology underneath.
Recent, sophisticated social scientists, especially game theorists, who began to understand the profound inabiility of the inductive scientific method to explore validly much phenomena involving human choice put a new dress and some competitive interplay assumptions on praxeology and renamed it strategic bargaining games and counterfactual inference. The only problem is that the bargaining games are more full of assumptions than the praxeology itself, and so are even more vulnerable to manipulations by those with dubious ethics. And the counterfactual inferences are really just praxeologies with a new name.
So, your appraiser says: the highest and best use of the Wright house is to be collected.
He researches and finds sales of Wright Houses. He finds two the last year.
He researches and finds sales of non collector houses in the neighborhood. He concludes there is a huge premium that will be paid for the Wright house because it is a Wright House.

pt4
The lender trusts the appraiser is not lying, because the appraiser has documented the phenomenon and followed the traditional appraisal methodology (i.e, the praxeology dating back to the Austrian economists of the late 19th Century).
The lender loans.
The Wright house sells.
This sale becomes a part of the comparable sales that will be used to document future sales of Wright houses.
Do you see the virtue of this process and the potential for abuse also?
This is how it is--with some variations--in every society with legally enforceable, private property rights to land with improvements called real estate AND having money-based economies, where the ultimate criterion of value is cash.
So why talk about real estate appraisal on a design board?
Because price is one of the many contextual fits that must be made in the design/architecture of real estate.
And because you have reason to think that a market is segmenting and suggests that prices are quite a bit higher for collectible real estate designed by designer architects...that's why. 🙂

More Gustavo...Regarding auctions vs. real estate agents...
Game theorists, i.e., scholars who try to find formalizations that describe and predict equilibrium tendancies of two or more players in competition, given an opportunity set of plays, incentives, risks, rules, etc., presently think auctions tend to optimize the extraction of cash from buyers.
In an auction, there are many potential bidders in the room at the same time and their intermediary--the auctioneer--has one purpose--inciting bidders awareness of latest price and competitiveness of acquisition in order to heighten bidders tendancies to let their both their reasons and passions propel them to the highest bid possible. Also, a seller in an auction makes a firm commitment to sell the day of the auction, even if a minimum price is required. This commitment by the seller takes away any need on the part of the auctioneer to get seller and buyers to compromise in order to make the transaction occur. The transaction is going to occur, if the minimum bid is high enough. This clarity of information makes auctioneer and bidders act much more on the competition of bidding rather than the compromise of negotiation. Higher price is observed to result.
Now compare this with transacting through a real estate agent.
Real estate agents also seek to bring the seller the bidder with the highest price, but out of self interest cull the bidders for those that the agent believes are most likely to actually transact. The agent is trading off maximum price for increasing probability of transaction and making a sales commission. This bias in the real estate agent game tends to suboptimize price, while heighening probability of transaction.
Further, a real estate agent tends to reduce the game to one buyer and one seller and then work very hard to find common ground between buyer and seller; i.e., to get each to compromise on price in order, again, to optimize the probability of a transaction.

pt 2
Game theorists think that by hugely increasing the probability of a transaction through the sellers commitment in an auction format, that competition is incited and the bidding game is biased toward higher price.
Game theorists are not dummies of course and the smart ones understand certain circumstances may favor auctions and others may favor the real estate agent format.
For instance, if you can get a lot of hot-to-buy buyers to show up at an auction house on a given day to bid competitively for something, then an auction is the way to optimize price.
But if you cannot get a lot of hot-to-buy buyers to show up at an auction house on a given day; that is, if there are few persons who are likely to really want this thing being sold, and if those few persons take a long time to locate, and tend not to like the auction experience, then you'd be a damned fool to auction something. You should, instead, retain an agent with expertise in finding the kind of buyer you want and plan on taking all the time necessary to seek out that special buyer who really, really wants this property and can afford it; then let this experienced agent work through the compromises necessary to reach agreement to transact.
And just like Bob Dylan once sang, "You don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows," you also don't really need a game theorist to tell you when to auction and when to use an agent, if you can think a little on your own.
The auction approach and the agent approach have existed for as long as there have been things to buy and sell and money (or other forms of consideration) to buy and sell with.
Game theorists just got some grants to rationalize and systematize the strategic bargaining process, especially for government agencies, who often finding themselves being asked (coerced) to transact property rights to, say, bandwidth, that have never been sold off recently, and which seem to be worth quite a lot, and which require a bit of fiduciary CYA to protect everyone's salaries and pensions, should lawyers begin suing over things being sold for inappropriate prices.
In short, art often goes by auction, because there are lots of well-heeled collectors willing to show up one day at the same time to transact not just one painting, but dozens or hundreds. Real estate often transfers through agency, because there are fewer buyers, they can be harder to locate, and real estate transactions just are much more complicated in terms of legal and financial documentation than would be, say, a painting.