Trying to Buy Permanent Residence In a Particular Sub-Division

[Ryan Hickman]

Fiancee' and I are trying to buy our first home and have narrowed down exactly where we want it. Problem is there are only 200 homes total. This location is ideal because it is surrounded by parks, bike trails, and we can walk to public transportation which takes us to work in Chicago; this is rare for living in the suburbs and being reasonably priced. Besides waiting for the selling market to pick-up in Spring is there anything I or my agent can do pro-actively? My agent mentioned she could reach out to local brokers to see if we can get information on sellers before publicized and that she has an application which alerts her when a photographer starts taking pictures of a house to soon be listed. Besides that does anyone have any ideas? 

I do not mind waiting until Spring, we are in no-rush to move, but we have already gotten beat in this subdivision 2x by other buyers, so we are trying to think of how to be more competitive (Yes we know the obvious answer is offer more $). The first time the seller verbally agreed to a negotiated price below asking but then ended up going with a previously interested buyer who fell thorough months prior. The second time we went 2 days after it was posted and they already verbally accepted an offer for above asking which we were not willing to match since in our opinion it is still a buyers market in the Chicago area and based on the previous 2 years worth of data in this subdivision 10/10 homes sold below listing price, so either that buyer was an outlier or the market is shifting (Or other buyers are figuring out how good this location is).