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.

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)

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.

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?

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?

So with the “state” of the economy, and all the drum and glum you hear/read about these days, and everyone says it is a buyer’s market, someone must of forgotten to tell the sellers! We’re having a hell of a time trying to come up with something in Parker Colorado that fits into what we want.

We’ve now made 7 offers on 4 different houses, and we’re aren’t any closer than when we started. 2 of those 4 houses are short sales, one we actually still have a pending offer hanging out there, and the other we are likely to bid on again as our 8th offer we’re about to make will be the third on the particular house, and I don’t think the seller is going to come down in price where we want. So far the buyer has only come down in price by $2k, and based on our request for the hot tub, washer, dryer, they cut the closing concessions by half. This next offer, which we’ll sign in the morning, will be the last offer we make on this house. We’ll see how the seller comes back.

Needless to say we are getting very frustrated with this process! We would like to move, but  we really don’t want  to settle on a house we won’t be happy with.

So yesterday we put in another house offer in Parker Colorado. This time for a more reasonably priced house, with the offer being around 89% of their asking price. I’m not sure if they’ll accept, counter, or just ignore us like the last offer. We’re anxious to find out. If they were to accept it that will put our closing date on 6/30, which once you start to think about it is just right around the corner! yikes.

I’ll post an update when we hear about the offer.

So this was day 2 of our third trip to Parker Colorado, ultimately I think this is day 5, maybe 6 of house hunting here in Parker. We started off at the realtor’s office discussing what we thought would be a good offer on the short sale (#2) we came across yesterday.

After that we headed off to look at houses around 9am this morning. We saw ~14 houses today, some of which were good, some of which were not so good. It’s amazing how many houses are for sale that are within close vicinity of the powerlines that split through Parker. We found one house that was right on the 18th fairway of a golf course, but the power lines were not far from the house, so that was ruled out. We found 2 golf balls in the back yard without even having to look, so maybe it was a good thing that the power lines ruled out the house. Two houses down the house had a huge flagpole that had a large net to protect the backyard, house and deck.

We also found a great looking house, it was perfect in almost every way, until we went into the garage. It was listed as a 3 car garage, but there was physically no way that it was possibly a three car garage, I should have taken a picture, it was a 2 door garage, with about 1/2 a car space on one side, the biggest problem though was the two support pillars in the way preventing you from parking a car there.

We found a number of houses with hot tubs today, and a number of nice backyards. We also drove around the neighborhood where the short sale house (#2) is again and looked around, it was good to see that someone was swimming in the pool and there were two lifeguards, so my fears that the clubhouse wasn’t open anymore were eased.

We came across one house that has been on the market for just over 40 days, it has 5 bedrooms, 1 of those being in the finished basement, 3 full baths, and a decent backyard. It’s a bit out of our price range, but we’re going to make an offer, quite a bit lower, and see what they come back with, hopefully we’ll be able to negotiate in our range. We’re going to sign the documents on the offer tomorrow, I’ll wait to post pictures of it until we hear something back on the offer. No sense in showing all our cards if the seller happens to stumble on this site!