What started off as a pile of dirt in an empty lot is now a move-in ready four-bedroom home.

Kalispell’s Student Built Homes completed their seventh build after 30 students invested around 7,500 hours for this year’s program.

“This is their final project, per se, and 20 years from now they can come back and show their kids, their grandkids, ‘Hey, I built that house, I’m proud of that.’ It’s a really neat aspect of this job,” said Flathead High teacher Brock Anderson.

The new home hit the market and is priced at $699,900, a new reality many are finding difficult.

In January 2020, the median home price for the city of Kalispell was $292,050. As of April 2022, the median home price sits at $572,250.

“I feel sad right now for our students, unless they plan on living with mom and dad for the rest of their lives, we’re shipping out our No. 1 resource, and that’s our kids,” said Anderson. “They can’t afford to live here. They’ve gone out and done stuff, and they want to move back to the Flathead Valley where they’re born and raised -- they can’t afford to do that.”

One upside to the growing home cost is every year the profit from the student-built home gets reinvested into the next year’s project home for the next class of students.

In the last eight years, Anderson has introduced over 200 students into the skilled labor workforce.

When students finish the program, they earn 360 hours of apprenticeship that gets recorded with Montana Department of Labor.