Harder

Man, when we bought our house in Arizona over 8 years ago I thought it was tough because it's in a tiny little town of about 1,200 people and there were less than a handful of houses to pick from and two of the first ones we made offers on decided to withdraw their houses from sale.  I figured this time around being in a city of 50,000+ it would be super easy...WRONG!  The housing market is booming here, and never really saw the economic recession the rest of the country experienced.  Houses are priced high and they go quick.  The houses that we have been looking at literally go within a two week window.  A few times by the time our agent sent us the listing and we went and did a drive by, the house was already under contract.

We thought we might have a unique opportunity to get a "fixer-upper" at a good deal, but found out that the banks basically won't do it.  It's a HUD home where the previous owners had an FHA loan and foreclosed on it.  As they left the property they did extensive vandalism and basically took a hammer to the upstairs drywall, broke several of the doors, and took out all the appliances and some cabinets in the kitchen.  There is one bank in town that will do a special loan where you can buy a property that needs work and they finance the contractors to fix everything for you.  It's incredibly frustrating because we could have done the work ourselves and saved a ton of money.  Now it's not a good deal because we still would have to pay back the money for the contractors, and who knows how much a contractor will charge.

Another point of frustration was today when I went to look up the number for our banker and saw on the website that the interest rate jumped from 3.5% when we did our pre-qualification work to 4.1% now.  Now I am totally scared that it will keep rising and we missed our opportunity to have a low interest rate.

I hope that we will find a home soon and get our foot in the door on making an offer!