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...
A client called me a few weeks ago asking about Anthem Ranch in Broomfield. She and her husband are 61 and 58, their kids are grown, and they are done maintaining a five-bedroom house in Highlands Ranch they do not need anymore. Her first question was not about price. It was whether they could even buy there if her husband was only 58. What "55+" Actually Means (It Is Not What Most People Assume) The rule...
A client of mine in Highlands Ranch called last month with a good problem. She bought her house in 2021 at 2.875%, it's worth about $260,000 more than she owes on it now, and she'd just found a small rental property in Parker she wanted to buy in cash-flowing condition. Her first instinct was to refinance her primary home and pull the equity out. Her second instinct, after we ran the numbers together, was...
An investor I worked with last month wanted to add a third rental property to her portfolio, a duplex a few blocks off Mainstreet in Parker. Her accountant had already told her the truth she didn't want to hear: two years of depreciation write-offs on her existing rentals made her tax returns look nothing like her actual income, and a conventional lender was going to struggle to approve her. Her loan...
A buyer I've been working with found a beautiful two-acre lot in Elbert County last month, the kind of spot where you can build exactly what you want with room for horses and no next-door neighbor in sight. He assumed financing it would work like buying a house. Then his lender asked for 35% down, and the whole timeline he'd been planning got a lot more complicated. Why a Land Loan Doesn't Work Like a...
I worked with a Space Force officer moving from Los Angeles to Colorado Springs last winter, and the first thing he told me was that his previous agent had talked him out of using his VA loan because sellers in that market did not like them. That advice cost him money he did not need to spend. Between Fort Carson, Peterson Space Force Base, Schriever Space Force Base, and Buckley Space Force Base in...
A couple I worked with in Lone Tree last year found their next home before their current one had even hit the market. They loved it, the sellers wanted a quick close, and waiting for their own house to sell first wasn't realistic. Instead of scrambling for a specialty bridge loan, their lender opened a HELOC against the equity in their current home, and that gave them the down payment they needed to move...
A recently retired couple looking in Cherry Creek this year had a strong investment portfolio and almost no reportable income on paper. A standard lender looked at their tax returns and saw very little to qualify against, even though they had more than enough net worth to comfortably afford the house. That's exactly the situation an asset depletion loan is built for, and I've had more of these...
A self-employed client in Castle Pines this spring had 15% to put down on a house and did not want to pay mortgage insurance for the next several years while her income kept growing. Instead of putting less down and paying PMI, or draining her reserves to hit 20%, we structured her purchase as an 80-10-10, sometimes called a piggyback loan. It's not a new idea, but I've had more clients ask about it this...
A buyer called me last month convinced she had to waive her inspection contingency or she would never win a house in Highlands Ranch. She was half right. The market has been competitive enough this year that waiving inspection contingencies has become common again, but "common" and "right for you" are two different questions, and I want to walk through both sides honestly before you decide.Here's what the...
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