House buying is shit

Buying a house is stressful. I mean, I knew it wasn't going to be all fun and games, but I didn't think it was going to be this awful. Finding something decent in our price range was awful. Inspections were awful. Real estate agents are awful. Banks are awful.

And I really don't understand the market at the moment. There is such high demand for properties, you'd think the owners/agents would wait until the end of the week until they'd collected a bunch of offers, and then picked the best one. That would surely be the most beneficial thing for them. Instead, properties are listed one day and either sold that day or the next. It's like people are accepting the first offer they get. It doesn't make sense to me. And it's completely frustrating. We go and view a property and decide to put in an offer, and so call up an hour after we've seen it to let the agent know, and they say it's already under offer! I just don't understand.

Anyway, it appears we may have finally found something. Barring an unfavourable building/pest inspection, it seems it will all go ahead. However, the bank is being an absolute bastard. The mortgage would only be 80% of the property value, so we wanted to borrow a bit more to do some renovations to the place, which would have increased the value of the property by at least 17%, but they wouldn't approve it. I don't understand why. It's not like we can't make the repayments. And it would be increasing the value of the property, meaning that when we revalue it in a year's time, we'd have more equity in the property. It's currently a 3 bedroom house with one bathroom, a small kitchen, and a single carport. We'd build in underneath and turn it into a 4 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom, double garage, with an extended kitchen and larger living area. I don't know why they're against it. The broker said something about them wanting us to pay the loan off sooner, but that doesn't make sense. If we did the renovations and revalued it, the bank's interest in the property would be less (say, 70%), which is surely a good thing for the bank. Ridiculous.

So yes. I have mixed feelings about it all. I like the house, but it's not practical for my lifestyle at the moment, but if the bank won't give us the extra money, we won't be able to do anything to it for a while. So we'll effectively be living in limbo, which is shit. If I'd known they were going to do this, I would have kept the deposit and used it for the renovations, and gone for a 100% loan or something. Stupid bank. I really don't want to be one of those people who buys a place with dreams of renovating, and 5 years later they haven't done anything to it. Bleh.

Oh well. I guess we'll see how it all goes.