Not the megabucks kind. The Nunes have the money. Their problem has been finding a home before someone else snatches it up. So last month they drove out to Mililani on a Saturday morning and put their names in a brass colander along with 195 others for a chance to buy one of 20 Castle & Cooke Island Classics homes starting at $438,000.

What they experienced is something more and more hopeful new-home buyers in Hawai'i are going through: a nerve-racking process with odds high against being one of the lucky few picked to purchase a market-priced house.

Low interest rates and a dwindling supply of homes for sale have made Hawai'i more than just a seller's market. It's a buyer's nightmare. Buyers are using brokers to find homes before they are listed on the market, offering more than the asking price, and camping out days in advance to be first in line at new home sales. And then there is the lottery.

"It's kind of an excruciating process," Lugiell Nunes said after drawing lottery No. 51 for the 20 Island Classics homes. "We just have to (accept) the fact that it is not meant to be. We'll try again."

Most of the state's major home developers instituted lotteries for their most popular homes in the past year or so as a fairer and more civilized sales process than a first-come, first-served policy that oftentimes led to mobs camping out for days.

The lotteries are reminiscent of ones Hawai'i developers used to meet county-mandated "affordable" housing sale quotas in the early 1990s. But this time, lottery winners are buying homes for $400,000 or more.

And unsuccessful lottery competitors are finding that prices are usually higher for the same home model offered in each subsequent lottery, increasing the stakes for these real-life contests

"It's unbelievable," said Mililani resident Bill Dutton, who has been through two lotteries recently with his wife, Stacy, and drawn numbers only high enough to make backup reservations.

"To stay in a lottery to pay $450,000 — man, it's amazing," Stacy Dutton said, explaining that 13 years ago she and her husband paid $99,000 for a house in Kamuela on the Big Island through an affordable-home lottery.

Developers say the lottery system may be an unusual way to buy a home, but it creates an equal opportunity in a market with rising prices and production that can't keep up with demand. After a builder announces a lottery, buyers send in their names and the company has a drawing to assign each buyer a number. The No. 1 buyer gets to pick among the available models, narrowing the choice for those who follow.

"The process can be a somewhat difficult one under the market conditions," said Mark-Allen DeCastro, principal broker for The Renaissance, a Castle & Cooke project in Waipahu.

For prospective home buyers who lose out, trying again often will cost more because prices for new homes have been rising roughly $5,000 a month, according to estimates by two developers.

The builders, who typically release batches of homes for sale every month or two, said they base price increases on rising resale values of previously owned homes.

"It is a condition of the marketplace," DeCastro said. "The buyers will stop buying if they perceive the value is not there.

"It's not a perfect system. I don't think there's ever going to be one. It's better than having people lined up around the street and sleeping over for two days to be in the first position."

Stanford Carr Development learned just how cumbersome a first-come, first-served system can be when it announced the release of 83 single-family homes for sale at its Maunaleo subdivision in Central Maui in November.

Three days before the sales office opened on a Saturday there were about 200 cars lined up on an old banana patch road waiting to put down $5,000 deposits. "It was crazy," said Patrick O'Neill, Stanford Carr's sales and marketing vice president.

In the interest of safety, the company processed reservations that night, and repeated the processing when another 100 or so cars lined up in each of the next two days.

"In retrospect, if we had known there was going to be that much demand we probably would have done the lottery," O'Neill said, adding that the company's 132-townhome Kehalani Gardens project on Maui later this year will use a lottery sales system.

Rick Hobson, vice president of sales and marketing for Gentry Homes, said the mass campouts that started last year became unmanageable, especially in communities where people were already living.

"There'd be 20 to 30 families in their minivans with their hibachis rolled out," he said. "If you lived next door, you wouldn't want people camping out, cooking on their hibachis in your front yard. It was a nuisance to the communities."

At one sales event at which Gentry prohibited overnight camping, Hobson said a line formed once the sales agent left for the day. Then a rival line formed at 12:01 a.m. and contested that it had not violated the rules and should be processed first.

"The sales agent called me and said, 'We have a mob situation. You have to fix this,' " Hobson recalled. "We tried to preserve the competitive spirit, but it just got out of hand. Lottery is the way to go definitely. "

Of Hawai'i's five largest home developers, the only one not embracing a lottery system is Haseko Homes, developer of the master-planned Ocean Pointe community in 'Ewa Beach.

Haseko maintains an "interest list" of prospective buyers. The list does not have a first-come, first-served priority, but is filtered by sales agents, according to Richard Dunn, executive vice president of Haseko Realty.

"A lottery can be very stressful to people," Dunn said. "We can't tell you if you are going to get a home this month or next month — but maybe it takes four or five months to move up to the top of the list — eventually you get a home. With a lottery, you may never get a home. It's the luck of the draw."

Haseko's wait list has roughly 400 buyers. The company releases about 30 homes a month, and is on track to deliver 350 to 400 homes this year. Dunn said the list churns as new people are added and others are removed as they buy a home or decide not to buy.

Sergio Ramirez, a Kapolei homeowner who recently was looking to buy a new house, participated in both a lottery and a first-come, first-served system that ranked priority by the time stamp on faxed applications. He fared well in both but said he preferred the fax system.

Ramirez faxed his application in before anyone else for a Graham Builders single-family home at Mililani Hillside, but withdrew after winning the third spot in the lottery for the 20 Island Classics homes by Castle & Cooke nearby.

"Either way, you're running the chance that someone else might beat you to it," he said.

At the Island Classics lottery 196 prospective buyers vied for 20 homes.

During the drawing, which was witnessed by about two dozen applicants, there was muted excitement as names printed on 3x5 cards were drawn from the brass colander and announced. One exclamation of "That's me!" emanated from someone picked in the top 10, but the room fell quiet when selections passed 30. By 50, people started to leave.

"Once you get past 50, that's the most difficult job in the world," said Bruce Barrett, Castle & Cooke's sales and marketing vice president, who drew and read aloud all 196 names.

No. 4, Michael Miranda, said he didn't think he'd pull a good number, but his wife, Freda, said she had no doubt they'd get a house. At a follow-up event to select from four models split among the 20 home sites, they got their fourth choice.

No. 13, Bradley Yamada, said that out of the four models available there was one left that he and his wife, Lisa, wanted when it was their turn to pick. "Wow! Lucky No. 13," he said.

No. 68, Bernard Ramos, left dispirited, but vowed to try again. "We had our fingers crossed," he said. "We really wanted it."