Current Events > Housing market is fucked even worse than most of you realize (anecdotal)

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My brother and I are trying to get our shit together, get out of the slums and into a decent life. He just had a baby. Rent around here is $1500~ for a 3 bedroom house. Little brother makes $55k/year, I make $24k/year, and his baby mama makes $24k/year for a total of around $100k/year.

I've been handling the paperwork mostly and we got our first two rejections today. Everything looked good on the first one but they decided my 650 credit score was not sufficient to be responsible for the rent of their $1800/month house. Would not let me get a co-signer for the credit. The credit was the only issue, my payment history going back 20 years is spotless but I'm carrying a little more credit card debt right now than usual and a personal loan I'm still paying off from pandemic times.

Second one got rejected because of little brother's criminal record. In 2006 he was 19 and hooked on pills. Broke into some houses when nobody was home to steal stuff to sell for pills (fucking opiods, man). He spent 7 years in jail, has been out since 2014 and has completely turned his life around. He's currently working as a salary factory floor manager for two years now. Other than the one incident his record is completely spotless.

Seriously, what the fuck do people expect? I sincerely have no idea how people are ever supposed to turn their lives around when every time you try to do the right thing, try to get ahead there's yet another road block. Collectively our income is more than double what anyone requires for housing in this area and we're stuck in two shitty rathole apartments because we can't get a place together. Feels pretty fucking hopeless right now.

Side note: You think landlords are bad? Property management companies are worse. I've always been able to work with landlords in the past but this fucking soulless corporations who treat housing as a luxury only to be afforded to the pristine are horrible. God willing the bottom will fall out of the housing market soon and they'll all go fucking bankrupt

Even worse is that often you can be paying 2k+/month in rent and get denied for a mortgage that would only run about $1500/month because the bank feels you can't make the payments...

QassTank posted...

Even worse is that often you can be paying 2k+/month in rent and get denied for a mortgage that would only run about $1500/month because the bank feels you can't make the payments...

Literally in that exact situation

it's because of the number of people looking for places. I moved in April and they told us 30 other people applied for the apartment we got. we applied for like 6 places and only got accepted at 3 of them

edit: oh I thought you meant for an apartment. well, same thing. lots of people looking for houses too

My dad owns a little house that he rents out and is looking for new tenants. We went to play frisbee golf yesterday and in that hour or so he got around 100 messages about it

Kudos to your brother getting his life together, and desiring to move up in life but you two aren't special in this regard. And many others are interested in home ownership also.

People with better credit scores(650 is bad) and zero crinimal baggage. Aside from that you two are just going to have to keep trying. 2 rejections aren't much, and new houses enter in and out of the market reguarly.

That does suck tbh, dunno what to tell you. Maybe go for a cheaper house. And go to different lenders, you don't have to resort to big banks chances are you will find some online lender to give u the loan u want

I'm moving across state this week to my first home. I was fortunate to have a lot in the bank and a good credit score. But I can empathize. Rent is outrageous and I've heard a lot about people getting rejected for mortgages that are actually cheaper than rent.

It's a crazy broken system

What state are you in TC?

Bummer. Hope you can find something soon.

fire_bolt posted...

$1500~ for a 3 bedroom house.

That's about how much a 1 room apartment is here in Portland

Yeah here in Austin its like 500k for a fixer upper lol.

It's a capitalist system. There's so much demand, from a banks perspective, why give a 650 credit score guy a loan when you can easily find a 750 credit score guy to give a loan to. There's so many people with alot of money and good credit that they don't need to stretch lower. That's why you need to find riskier lenders online who will probably require higher rates to accommodate the "risk".

The right time to do this was about twenty years ago, when the "subprime" boom was in full swing, but that's its own disaster.

Questionmarktarius posted...

The right time to do this was about twenty years ago, when the "subprime" boom was in full swing, but that's its own disaster.

The same mother fucker who bought into the .Com bubble.
We are still paying for that to this day.

Dan_Haren- posted...

That does suck tbh, dunno what to tell you. Maybe go for a cheaper house. And go to different lenders, you don't have to resort to big banks chances are you will find some online lender to give u the loan u want

This isn't to buy. This is just to lease from somebody. No banks involved

Bishop9800 posted...

What state are you in TC?

TN