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Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 12:13:36 AM
So Saturday at noon I booked a flight for Natalie and I to Denver, for our 5th trip to Colorado for house shopping. There were two homes that popped up last week, at the end of the week, that we thought looked great as prospects for us. We considered putting in offers without even going out and seeing them, but just couldn’t quite pull that trigger.
After skating 12 miles Saturday morning, well to be honest I skated 11 and walked the last mile due to hardware issues with my skates, I came home and talked to our agent, and then started looking at flight options. I tried and tried to make Priceline work for us, but the best deal we could get on priceline was $350/person, way more than we wanted to spend. After a few hours of effort I finally came across a last minute deal on Travelocity with airfare and two nights hotel in the Denver Tech Center for $280/person, I booked it and less than four hours later we were on our way.
Chris Hammond
Sunday, June 28, 2009 2:13:07 AM
At noon today we booked another flight to Parker Colorado, and it’s not midnight here in CO. We got into town around 10pm, drove by the two houses we’re looking at tomorrow to see what things look like at night. Hopefully tomorrow will be fruitful, two great looking houses, both are NOT short sales. I brought the good camera this trip. Time for bed.
Chris Hammond
Sunday, June 21, 2009 2:13:34 AM
Seems like each trip is turning out the same way. We find a few houses, mostly short sales, that we like. We make an offer. Rinse, repeat. Natalie and I got back from Colorado again this evening. I’ll post a longer update from the trip later, but here’s some pictures of the latest house we’ve offered on. We actually upped our offer A LOT, right before we left this afternoon. This house appears to be made for us. The upper level is nearly 100% tile floors, which will be great for the dogs. The backyard has hardly any grass in it, and what we saw was being chewed on by one of four dogs, so that will need to be planted/sod. The interesting thing about the backyard is that it is 60% (rough guess) paved, that’s right, paved. There’s concrete all the way around the sides, and somewhat down the middle. You might ask why. Well we figure it’s because of the dogs. Our dogs at the last place we rented ran a track around the yard at the fence, I figure that they paved to account for this. The inside upstairs is great, only a few things (trim to pain) left to do. The downstairs is another story. It was finished at one point, but our guess is the dogs made a MESS of the carpet, so it was all cut up. The basement doesn’t smell good, but hopefully we can get that corrected if we end up buying the house. It’s a short sale, so who knows if we will ever hear anything on it. The Front
 The Deck
 The View
 The Kitchen
 The Backyard (some of it)
Chris Hammond
Friday, June 19, 2009 10:39:18 AM
When people hear that we are moving to Colorado the most popular question by far is, Why? Well this is our answer. 
This is the view from our hotel room. We hope to find a house with a similar view.
Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 16, 2009 11:52:56 PM
We’re off to Parker again Thursday through Saturday to take what I think is our 5th house hunting trip? Maybe it’s only trip four, either way, we’ve seen a lot! Hopefully this will be the winning trip.
Chris Hammond
Monday, June 08, 2009 11:47:13 PM
Today I received an email from a title company out of Aurora Colorado, attached to the email was a bunch of title paperwork regarding one of the short sale homes we have a bid on. I didn’t get my hopes up too much though as back in April I received pretty much the same paperwork on this house, with different purchase price numbers as this bid is lower than that other bid. The last time this came through prematurely as the bank hadn’t yet accepted the offer, and it looks like this time it’s the same mistake. At least we know something is still moving, I called the title company to see what they had to say, they said the bank hadn’t yet come back on the offer, but they were shooting for a July 15th closing if the bank were to accept. So we’ll see what happens, we’re still keeping our fingers crossed as this is the house that is our first choice. We’re looking at another trip out to Parker probably next week to do some more house shopping and possibly start looking at apartments in the area if we’re not able to locate a house here soon.
Chris Hammond
Sunday, June 07, 2009 6:02:55 PM
So one of the complaints I’ve had in this whole process of looking for a house is the lack of websites that actually show you good photos of a home. For some realtors don’t or can’t upload high quality photos of a house. Well we finally found a home that has high quality photos online, and I must say it is a great thing to see! Here’s a link to the photos of the house I found. (click on start tour, then click on Full Screen). http://homesite.obeo.com/viewer/default.aspx?tourid=542611&refURL=&locale=en-US Now, that tour doesn’t show you the garage, which is another one of my beefs, but it is definitely a step up from most of the listings we’ve seen. Are you a realtor? Do you realize that people want to see large, high quality photos of a house? Are you not able to upload those to the listing websites?
Chris Hammond
Saturday, June 06, 2009 12:18:45 PM
So we gave up on the house we were making offers on earlier in the week. We gave them our final offer and they came back with an offer that wasn't close to that so we are done with offering on that house for a while. I got an email from Realtor.com this morning, it looks like they dropped the price $3k recently, too little too late for us. We'll take a look at making an offer again in the future, but it won't be any more than we've previously offered, perhaps less.
So right now we have two offers out on short sale homes in the Parker area. We're hopefull that one of those will go through, but we're not expecting to hear much back on those any time soon. I did get a realtor.com email last night with an interesting house that just went on the market in Parker, so perhaps we'll see if we can't line up a few more new listings and make another trip out there in the next month and look around.
We're starting to think we may end up doing a short term, month to month, lease on an apartment out there if both of these short sales fall through.
Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 02, 2009 10:53:53 AM
So here we are, two and a half months into our house hunting in Parker Colorado and as of right now we have one offer out there on a short sale, the original short sale we offered on. This third offer was more of a, hey see if you can get the bank to do another appraisal, kind of offer, lower than our rejected offer, but it is still out there. We were looking at a house in Whooping Crane (street) in Parker Colorado, but the owners have yet to respond to our offers with any sort of a reasonable counter offer. They countered to our final offer, but remain about $5k off the mark, so we’re going to just drop that house and move on. We’ve got another short sale that we are likely going to pursue, the benefits of this house over Whooping Crane are that it is newer, larger, nicer, and has a pool in the neighborhood. Here are the fronts of the two houses Whooping Crane 
Short Sale 
What do you think?
Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 02, 2009 10:37:05 AM
An interesting article on MSNBC this morning, yet another reason to move to Colorado! http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30991972 If you want to be in the right place when the recovery starts, that place may be in Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Texas or Washington. The recession didn't start at the same time in every state, and it won't end at the same time either. A new forecast from Moody's Economy.com predicts that jobs growth will return first in those five states, starting in the last quarter of this year. Four of those states benefit from strong high-tech industries, and the fifth, Texas, has a strong base of energy industries.
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