Investment property refinancing

my brother and i bought an investment property a couple of years ago. we wanted to flip the house and obtained a high interest mortgage (9%). long story and many sales(which fell through)later due to a terrible economy and the house didn't sell, we rented the property for $600pm less than our mortgage. we had to evict our tenant for non payment last week. we have never missed a payment and all we want to do is refinance to a reasonable interest rate so we can weather this economy but because the house value has dropped and we now have only a small amount of equity in the house we don't qualify for a refinance. we called the mortgage company and asked if we they could lower our interest rate and were told that because we hadn't missed any payments we didn't have a hope. if we missed some payments they would consider lowering our rate. both of our credit scores are great and we don't want them to suffer. our families are suffering because of all the money we are putting into this property - we need advice!