Sharry DeVall found the perfect Kalispell home last summer through the Northwest Montana Community Land Trust.

And the land trust is looking for more buyers like DeVall this weekend with an open house at one of the two houses it has still available for sale.

The three-bed, two-bath house at 2154 Merganser Drive will be open from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Priced at $90,000, it’s part of a larger, two-day real estate showcase that Realtors organized to feature scores of houses for sale in the Flathead Valley.

DeVall lives on Ruddy Duck Drive in the same south Kalispell neighborhood.

She decided to explore the land trust after reading a newspaper article about it forming to buy, refurbish and resell vacant foreclosed homes left in the wake of the housing bubble crash and hard recession.

As a first-time home buyer, DeVall visited about half of the 16 houses in the land trust before settling on one. The land trust launched with a $2.6 million grant Kalispell received through the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program.

“There were a lot of them I liked. They all had pluses and minuses,” said DeVall, who now sits on the land trust’s board of directors. “This one was the first one I walked into where one of my sons wanted one room and the other wanted another room and they both didn’t want the same room. That was telling me something.”

DeVall was the land trust’s first home buyer. And after a slow start, the program has gained steam. With a couple of recent buy-sell agreements, 14 of the 16 houses have found buyers.

Northwest Montana Community Land Trust brings a new home ownership model to Kalispell.

“It allowed me to achieve a goal I had that I would not have been able to do as a single working parent with one income,” DeVall said.

Houses are sold separate from the land, which is leased for $25 a month. That makes the houses more affordable for creditworthy buyers who must meet income restrictions and be primary occupants.

Most of the land trust houses are available to people earning up to 120 percent of the area median income. Other houses are reserved for people earning 50 percent or less of area median income, about $19,400 for one person or $27,700 for a family of four. That includes the two remaining for sale.

DeVall said the land trust program helped her buy a better house than the fixer-uppers that were available in her modest price range. And those fixer-uppers were not projects she was willing or even able to take on as a working single mother of two.

“These first homes are all under 10 years old, so they’re pretty energy-efficient. Almost all of them were turnkey,” DeVall said. “If they needed paint, they got painted. Some of them got new appliances and utilities.”

Land trust houses can be deeded to family members or sold to eligible buyers.

One catch is a resale restriction that lets sellers recoup their original equity and up to 25 percent of any growth in their house’s value. That’s a mechanism to let owners build equity but also keep the houses affordable.

The land trust was awarded another $1.5 million grant last year. It has used that money to buy five additional vacant houses and is looking to buy more. But it cannot sell any of those houses until the first round of houses are sold, said Marney McCleary, housing director for Northwest Montana Community Action Partnership and acting executive director of the Northwest Montana Community Land Trust.

“We’re looking for people at or below 50 percent of area median income for those houses so we can start on the others we’ve bought,” McCleary said.

Money raised from the initial sale of land trust houses goes back into the program and can be used to buy more houses.

“We’ll end up with 40 to 50 houses in the end,” McCleary predicted. She added that the land trust would like to expand beyond Kalispell into Flathead, Lincoln, Sanders and Lake counties. “It started with the city of Kalispell because that’s where the funds were awarded. The city was very involved in that effort.”

To view a land trust home, call Jennifer Shelley of National Parks Realty at 249-8929.

Reporter Tom Lotshaw may be reached at 758-4483 or by email at tlotshaw@dailyinterlake.com.