Buying Homes In Pittsburgh…How did it all start?

Our Home Buying Company, Dustin Buys Houses, was founded in 2018 by Dustin and Kim. We are a husband and wife team (if you didn’t figure that out already 🙂 ) that love buying and fixing up our properties. It all started from watching probably one too many episodes of HGTV (Flip or Flop, Property Brothers, Fixer Upper). Dustin loved the idea of buying a house to flip and fixing it up. It took a little bit of convincing to get Kim on board, but before you knew it, we had scrounged up our life savings to buy our very first flip property in March of 2018.

We spent 4 months completely gutting and restoring a 2 bedroom 2 bath home in Pittsburgh. Completely didn’t know what we were in for. We figured it would be an easy kitchen and bath remodel, some flooring, paint and good to go! Unfortunately we found some termite damage on the exterior wall of the home and ended up gutting the whole house down to the studs and redoing EVERYTHING. That was a learning experience to say the least 🙂

We sold that home 4 months later after hours upon hours of blood, sweat, and tears (we did ALL of the work ourselves) turned a small profit and immediately began searching for our next project.

Dustin was working as a commercial carpenter and suffered a life altering injury. It was early on a Tuesday morning, work had gone pretty normal the day before, and Dustin woke up in extreme pain and with a loss of nerve function to his right leg and foot. After an MRI, it was confirmed that a severe disc herniation was cutting off nerve function to his right leg, and the doctors told him he likely would not be able to work in construction anymore.

“Having my wife push me around in a wheelchair at 29 years old was probably one of the most humbling things I’ve ever experienced. It taught me a lot about life, not taking things for granted, and that at any moment we are presented with circumstances that are completely outside of our control and we just have to play the cards we are dealt.”

With this new found problem, we needed to find a new solution. We had been flipping part time (working 80 hours a week) but after the injury we had no choice but to try and make this new career in renovating homes work for us full time and provide enough money to feed the family. Since then a lot has changed, we take on multiple projects at a time, and don’t do much of the work anymore, but our passion and excitement of buying houses and providing clean, renovated homes to our neighbors in Pittsburgh is what we LOVE doing on a daily basis.

Dustin

After growing up in another part of the state, and not finding a fit in college or in a career after high school, he moved to the Pittsburgh area in 2011 (where his family is originally from). Starting from scratch, he worked various jobs in the beginning just scraping by. After driving tractor trailer for a few years and not finding much enjoyment in it, he joined a carpenter apprenticeship working in commercial construction as he always had a fascination with construction and remodeling. After his injury, he decided to get into real estate full time, got licensed as a real estate agent, and hasn’t looked back since. Dustin is heavily involved in the day to day operations, and manages construction and marketing.

Kim

Kim also grew up on the other side of the state, and met Dustin in November of 2014. After graduating from King’s College in Wilkes Barre with a master’s degree in health care administration, Kim found a job as a center manager for an urgent care in the Pittsburgh Area. Kim currently works as project manager for the same company at their corporate headquarters, but has been heavily involved in our house buying journey. She gets all the credit for the design work (Dustin is color blind 🙂 ) and hopes to one day leave her corporate job to better help Dustin run the business. Kim doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty, and since meeting Dustin could lay flooring and tile with the best of them. Where she really shines is painting, and painted our first house all by herself! Kim is also a licensed real estate agent.

Kurt – Acquisitions Specialist

Eric – Construction Project Manager

Why We Love Buying Houses

Uhhh….the money of course! Just kidding (although I guess that’s a part of it). We are regular people just like you, and found joy and happiness in our job (buying and renovating houses). For us it’s not about about the profits or making it big, simply put we LOVE helping homeowners sell their house as easily, and quickly as possible. It gives us the opportunity to meet wonderful people from all over Pittsburgh from various walks of life, in different situations and different circumstances. We TRULY want to create win-win scenarios with everyone we work with, and apply this principle to all aspects of our life, business and personal.

Pittsburgh Home Buyers That Care

As we hope you can see, we are normal people just like you, not some big, greedy corporation only concerned about their bottom line. We buy houses in Pittsburgh as a way of helping people that don’t want to go the traditional route, and may need another option. Our cash offers are fair, transparent, and based on actual numbers, not your situation. We know there are a lot of unscrupulous companies out there, and by reading through our website we hope you see that we are NOT one of them. Contact us today by filling out one of the forms on the site, or giving us a call so we can get started on providing you with an offer for your home.