The words one builder said during a consultation call basically sum up how I felt about the process of buying property, finding a home builder, and obtaining financing for both.

“It’s like which came first the chicken or the egg, everyone is scared to pull the trigger.” – wise words from an extremely friendly, helpful modular home builder. One that ended up not building in our area anyways (two long side stories to that: We live near state lines, and we didn’t end up doing modular anyways.).

I felt extremely naive and lost during the first few months of our project. As you know we randomly bought a camper, sold our house, and now live in my family’s backyard. We hadn’t really researched the land buying/home building process at all other than looking at properties on Zillow and house plans online.

Several people who had built homes recommended a particular bank in our area. I was told they were awesome at the construction to perm loan process and the land could be wrapped into it. (If you live in upstate SC contact me and I’ll send you the info!) So because of this, I felt like it would be easy-peasy.

Boy was I wrong.

We actually decided to go with a different lender than the one recommended to us. This was due to the fact that we originally were discussing the option of modular homes. (For anyone looking into this, be sure you understand the difference between on-frame and off-frame modular. We were looking at off-frame modular.)

The recommended lender in our area did not finance ANY type of modular home. Had we of contacted more modular builders to begin with with our plan ideas, we could have saved ourselves a ton of time, stress, and headaches.

So here’s where the issues started.

The Realtor

Realtor’s do not want to waste their time taking buyers to see tons of properties (especially rural, crazy ones!) if the buyers are not pre-qualified. Which makes TOTAL sense. I had my realtors license back when I was fresh and young and thought I could sell things (HA!). Wasting time was the first thing you were taught NOT to do.

Our realtor was a nice lady I found through an online search. We have purchased two homes previously. We used a different realtor for those two purchases than we did for the land. This was mostly because I wasn’t sure if all realtors knew details about purchasing land. Since we didn’t I wanted someone experienced.

Our realtor was very pleasant to work with, however she was a good bit older than both us, the sellers, and the sellers realtor. I felt like this generational difference caused some communication issues. Which left me feeling slightly frustrated sometimes. In saying that, she was very helpful with the land, she was extremely prompt in answering me, and she worked with our crazy work schedules and made sure we got to see the properties we wanted.

She did though want us to be pre-approved with a lender before investing too much time with us.

Once I had a long discussion with her about our wants and needs for the property, I started on my search for a lender.

The Lender

Usually lenders give pre-approvals with just a little information from you and it’s no big deal. However, we found when you are trying to finance the land and the build at the same time this gets a little tricky.

Maybe this was just us? But we hit a few snags in the pre-approval process.

First, I’ve already touched on the issue of modular vs. stick built financing. Many lenders won’t finance modular, so this is something that you may want to have your mind made up about in the beginning.

Second, like I said before, we live very close to state lines. Usually we think this is awesome and certainly an advantage of where we live! For lending however, this can also cause hiccups. Especially if you don’t know which state you are going to purchase the land in!

We had to be sure the lender we chose was licensed in both states that we could potentially purchase property in.

Third, the lenders we spoke with regarding building needed information on not just us as borrowers, but also the property type and construction information as well before they wanted to give us a pre-approval letter. Since we didn’t have the land or a builder picked out (more on that to come!) we couldn’t provide this information.

The Builder

First, when you call builders to get pricing many times their first question is “where’s your land?”. And when you say you don’t have any, they seem to automatically discredit you. I’m sure many people do waste builders time just wanting to be nosey, but this is so frustrating when you are a serious potential client!

Going into this I thought pricing on a home was no big deal. Give them your plans and wha-la here’s how much this will cost to build.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Side note – if you are going with a builder’s plans that they have already built before on a site similar to yours the pricing process is apparently much easier. If this is your plan, you probably will not have the issues we did with this.

We did not go this route however. Our home is not being built in a neighborhood (we actually ended up buying almost 14 acres!). And I really enjoy researching things on my own (and making my life complicated ha!) and found our home plan online from ConceptHome.com.

Which is awesome! I am so incredibly excited to see my dream come to life from the paper, but (big but here) this made pricing a whole new ballgame.

Since our builders (or any of them we talked to actually) had not built this house, or anything really similar in our area before, pricing was quite literally from the ground up.

This meant they had to take all the specs to each individual subcontractor they had to take it to their labor/material/etc. people to get prices and then get back to my builder. The builder who we ended up choosing told me pricing on a project like ours usually takes 3-4 weeks. I needed it in like a few days!!

This caused some miscommunications, stress, and lots of picture showing, but they did it. We were so grateful for their hard work. And even though we went over budget (oops!), we know it is going to be worth it in the end!

Have you built a home? What hiccups or issues did you encounter? Was the financing an easier process for you (I’m wondering if this was just our area)? I would love to hear from you in the comments!