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...
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...
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