Duder, Congrats on the house hunt. I think you got the point about a home inspection. Right?? LOL. You still could have gotten an inspection on the first house that you lost you just would not have the sale of the house contingent on that inspection. Are you looking FHA??? If so those properties need to pass an FHA inspection (so you are kinda covered there). Are you using a Realtor?? If not I suggest that you get one. For a buyers agent you really don't need to spend anything extra for a Realtor. They get paid from the seller so basically you get representation for FREE (you might have to pay a small documentation fee around $180.00). I know that someone suggested Realtor.com (they leave listings on for a while when the house is actually pending) for a home search... Not a bad site. That Zillow that you linked to is a good site. A Realtor might have special access to a site so you can search on your own (this is the best option) that has MLS listings and expanded information on the property. I think that right now is a great time to purchase a home. That zillow link show the value of that property over a time line. You can see the downward trend in home values. It is a buyers market and you should get a lot of house for the money compared to 3-5 years ago.
I purchased my second house in June of 2010, we got in just in time to get the First time home buyers tax credit (there was one for returning home buyers for $6500.00 instead of the $8000.00). We had a Realtor, she was okay at helping us search for a house (really she was not that good at searching but had a great Realtor search site so we could look ourselves) and my wife thought. "why are we paying (we are not paying the sellers are) a Realtor so much for just setting up appts to look at homes". We looked and looked and put offers in and had offers countered and declined. We had short sales rejected, and we were used as bait for buyers on the fence. Finally we found "our" house and needed to move quick. The sellers agent was friends with our agent and let us know that we were the second offer. The two offers were identical except we wanted a home inspection and the other couple did not. Our agent found out where the sellers were closing on there new home and meet them up there and re-presented our offer along with a plea to accept ours instead of the other couple. She sweet talked them into ours using everything in her power. The sellers accepted the inferior offer due to our Realtor. The power of an agent is amazing.
Oh and when we bought our first house my wife (girlfriend at the time) was just out of college and very young. We had talked about getting married but we were not even engaged when we moved in. So it can work and it does work that way a lot.
Best of luck on the house hunt.
PS. I think that you can see that there are plenty of people on this site that have experience in buying homes so feel free to ask as many questions as you can.
