Buyer Guides

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...

A buyer touring Castle Pines Village for the first time usually asks me the same question halfway through the gate: is this Castle Pines or Castle Rock? The honest answer is both, in a sense. Castle Pines Village is a gated golf community that carries a Castle Rock mailing address, and that small detail trips up more buyers than you would expect. Here is what else people miss before they make an offer.What...

A client called me last month, worried she had priced herself out of Parker before she had toured a single home. The number in her head was close, but not for the reason she assumed. She had budgeted for the mortgage payment and forgotten almost everything that comes with it.Here is what Parker actually costs right now, based on current listing data and the numbers I see on real closings, not a marketing...

A family I worked with last spring was living in Ohio, had two kids in school, and needed to be settled in Parker before the fall semester started. They flew out exactly once before closing. Twice, counting the day they picked up keys. Everything else happened over video calls, a shared folder of listings, and a lot of texting back and forth at odd hours because of the time difference.It worked. But it...

I get a version of the same question almost every month from clients who just transferred to a Denver-area company on an L-1 or E-2 visa. They assume buying a home here is complicated, or maybe not even possible, because they're not a citizen. It's neither. You don't need to be a US citizen or even a permanent resident to buy property in Colorado. What changes is which financing path makes sense for your...

A few months ago, a client of mine in Castle Rock found out during closing week that her new fence sat almost three feet onto the neighbor's lot. Nobody had done anything wrong on purpose. The fence had been there for years, the seller didn't know either, and the only reason it surfaced at all was a property survey her lender required. We caught it in time to fix it with a simple boundary agreement instead...

Manufactured and modular homes carry a stigma in a lot of buyers' minds that the current Colorado market does not really support anymore. With site-built homes still out of reach for a lot of first-time and budget-conscious buyers along the Front Range, factory-built homes on permanent foundations are a genuinely competitive path to ownership, but the financing and resale picture is different enough from...

Most people think an adjustable-rate mortgage is a bad word after what happened in 2008. That hasn't been entirely true for a long time. Today's ARMs are structured very differently, and for the right buyer in the right situation, one can genuinely make sense in Colorado's current rate environment. What an ARM Actually Looks Like Today Most ARMs now are hybrid loans, written as something like a 5/1 or 7/1...