I bought my dream home that wasn't listed for sale. 6 months of texts sealed the deal.

Ben Mutz used the app Unlisted to wait for his dream home to hit the market.Courtesy of Ben MutzBen Mutz was looking for a 6-bedroom home for his blended family in Ohio.He used an app to contact the owners of his dream home, which wasn't originally on the market.

Mutz developed a relationship with the owners that paid off when they eventually decided to sell.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.

Mutz and his family.Courtesy of Ben MutzAfter 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 o