How to ‘steal’ a home in today’s housing market.

The timing was tight for Kellie Clark and her husband, Bassam Bitar. She had gotten matched with a post-graduate medical residency program in Grand Rapids last March and had to report for work by mid-June.

The metro Detroit couple contacted one of West Michigan’s leading real estate offices straightaway, and they soon were scouring the few available existing homes on the market. But with both of them working full-time on the other side of the state, a challenging search became almost impossible.

“He would send us a house on a Monday, and we’d say, ‘Oh, we’ll drive up on the weekend,’” Bitar said. “By Wednesday, the house was gone.”

Often, the houses sold for far above list price – even though Clark and Bitar could see from pictures that they needed significant updating. Many times, buyers even waived inspections in order to get a leg up on other bidders.

Said Clark: “We lost hope in the existing market really quick.”

That prompted a “concern-oriented” conversation with the Realtor about how they would ever get into a house in time for Clark to start her residency. What they heard in response was an eye-opening suggestion: Have you thought about building new?

The couple hadn’t even considered it, in large part because they only had a couple months before they had to move. But they found out that Allen Edwin Homes already has many Move-In Ready Homes at various stages of construction in communities across Michigan.