A couple I'm working with right now put a contract on a new townhome in a Castle Rock community that's maybe two-thirds built out. Great floor plan, builder incentive on the rate, the whole thing. When they asked the sales rep how the HOA reserve fund was looking, the answer was a shrug and "the builder's association handles all that right now." That answer used to be the end of the conversation. As of...
Here's a scene I see more than I'd like: a buyer walks into a Colorado builder's model home on a Saturday, falls in love with the floor plan, chats with the friendly on-site sales rep, and hands over their name and phone number on the sign-in sheet. Three weeks later they call me wanting help negotiating upgrades or reviewing the purchase contract, and I have to tell them the honest thing. Once you've...
The title commitment almost always lands the same way. An email on a weekday evening, a PDF attachment with a file name that is mostly numbers, and no note explaining what you are supposed to do with it. Forty pages of underwriting language. Most buyers scroll for about ten seconds, decide it is paperwork for the lawyers, and close the file. I do not blame anyone for that. The document is written for...
A buyer I was working with in Aurora found a house she loved on a Saturday, wrote a strong offer, and had it accepted the same night. On Tuesday her lender called with a question nobody had thought to ask. Who owns the solar panels? Nobody knew. The listing remarks said "solar" and nothing else. It took nine days to get a straight answer out of the solar company, and when it finally came, that answer...
A question I get more often than you'd expect: "Can I just buy my parents' house for less than it's worth?" The answer is yes, and there's actually a name for it, a gift of equity. It's one of the more overlooked ways Colorado buyers cover a down payment, and it doesn't involve anyone writing a check. Here's the basic idea. A family member sells you a home for less than its appraised value, and the...
If you've seen a headline saying the 2026 conforming loan limit is $832,750, that number is right for most of the country, but it's not what buyers in Denver, Aurora, Parker, or Highlands Ranch actually get. Douglas County and the rest of the Denver metro area sit above the national baseline this year, and knowing your real number before you start shopping can change which homes qualify as a...
A client called me a few weeks ago with a good problem. She and her husband are being relocated to Japan for two years through her company, and instead of selling their Highlands Ranch townhome, they wanted to rent it out and come back to it later. Reasonable plan. Then she read her HOA's rules and saw a rental cap that made her nervous. So we pulled the actual declaration, not just the rules handout, and...
A buyer I worked with in Highlands Ranch looked at her closing statement last month and saw a line that read "seller credit, property taxes" for a few thousand dollars. She assumed the seller had just knocked that much off the price as a parting gesture. That's not what happened, and if you buy a home in Colorado without understanding property tax prorations, you'll probably have the same reaction she...
I've had more calls this summer from military families with PCS orders to Colorado Springs than any other kind of buyer. That's not an accident, May through August is peak PCS season, and Fort Carson, Peterson Space Force Base, Schriever Space Force Base, and the Air Force Academy all sit in or near a city where the market has actually loosened up a little this year. If you just got orders, here's the...
A buyer I worked with this spring found a two-bedroom unit in a mid-rise building near Cherry Creek. Great location, updated kitchen, priced right. Her lender pulled the building's Fannie Mae project status two days before we were set to write the offer, and it came back "unavailable." She wasn't buying a bad building. She was buying into a building that could no longer get a conventional loan, and that...
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