This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ben Mutz, 39, a retired Air Force officer who bought a home that wasn’t originally for sale in Oakwood, Ohio. Mutz used Unlisted, an app that allows prospective buyers to waitlist themselves on homes that are not yet on the market. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m recently engaged, and we’re blending families, so I’m going from a three-bedroom home to a six-bedroom home. Our community’s pretty small, with about 1,200 homes.
There aren’t a whole lot of six-bedroom homes in our neighborhood — we’ll have five kids between my fiancée and me — so we were already working with a very limited market.
I’ve moved quite a bit — this is my seventh duty station, and I’ve probably lived in about 15 houses between those seven different stops. So I’m very familiar with the moving process, both from a rental as well as from an ownership standpoint.
I rented the house I was in for two years, and I decided to purchase it. I did the entire process without an agent, and it really opened my eyes to see that there’s a different way of doing things than the traditional way. There are a lot of tools that are out there and readily available, where you can facilitate your own sale in an easier way.
When I first heard about Unlisted, it was getting off the ground. I was like, “Wow, this is an amazing concept.” I was able to use the platform to search and see which six-bedroom homes are available.
After a few months, I found our dream home: It had the square footage, the size, and the number of bedrooms. The listing had a couple of photos, and it had a cool story about the home and some of the history behind it. I favorited it, and I was added to the waitlist.
Then, through the grace of God and a little bit of good luck, a couple of months later, someone mentioned to me that their neighbor was moving. I was like, “Oh, cool, where are they located?” They told me, and I was able to cross-reference on Unlisted and said, “That’s on my list.”
I got in touch with the owners last fall through Unlisted, and over the course of a couple months, we were able to execute the sale. I closed in July 2026.
I built a relationship with the owners before they decided to sell
On the seller side of Unlisted, you can claim your property; you can update pictures and add your own owner evaluation. The owner had an evaluation which told me, “Hey, we’re potentially open to selling.”
I developed an incredible friendship with them. Over the course of about six months, we would text about sports, we would text about life, share photos of our kids and of our dogs. We built the connection that you don’t traditionally get in a normal home sale.
It was a long process, but part of the reason it took so long was that the homeowners weren’t retiring until June. So we agreed on a price in November, and as their retirement plans firmed up, in March, I said, “Hey, we probably need to have a contract in place.”
My dad is a very skeptical man, and he was like, “If you don’t have a contract, they’re going to find out they can get more money, and you may lose this house before you know it.”
When I reached out to them, they said, “Ben, we consider you family. We are good.” And I thought, “All right, the pressure’s off.” I don’t have to worry about losing the house. We can do it at our own pace.
Because we’ve developed such a friendship through the process, we were flexible with the closing being around their retirement day. It was a timeframe that worked well for both of us.
We live in a very active real estate market, where if a home comes to market and it’s a good deal, it’s usually sold within two or three days.
I bought our house for $800,000, but it appraised at $960,000, so I feel that we got an incredible deal.
If it had hit the market, it would have sold very quickly and probably for more than what we were able to negotiate.
Using Unlisted was different than any other home transaction
On other listing sites, you’re limited by what’s out there for sale.
Yes, you can pull up any house on Zillow, and it’s going to give you the overview, but you don’t know if that family moved in 20 years ago, one year ago, or whether they have any intentions of ever considering moving.
The house that I purchased was not the only one that I inquired about on Unlisted. I was able to talk with a few other families on there about their home, and they emailed over pictures, and some of them weren’t within our price range, or some of them were not a fit from a layout standpoint.
I’ve done traditional home sales with real estate agents where we know it’s going to be a competitive market, so we’ve written a personalized note so the owners see us not only as buyers, but as a family that will continue the next legacy in their home.
The value of an interpersonal connection with a buyer and seller is always important, but Unlisted allowed us to go directly to them. Normally, your agents are the middleman and middlewoman facilitating the deals, but we were able to very quickly get to know each other and really get connected on a personal level in a different way than I’ve ever done through any other home transaction.
The homeowners were going to retire and move out of state regardless. But it was the personal connection that we built with them that helped us secure the home. They loved our story of two families coming together, and the home we’re moving into is 100-plus years old with a deep history.
They were genuinely excited for us to get the opportunity to live there and make it the next chapter of the home’s story.
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