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)

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.

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 Natalie and I made our way here yesterday, stopping in Colby Kansas to sleep last night and then finishing the drive this morning. We started off the morning looking at houses on 1-2 acres outside of Parker, though to be honest up until after lunch today we were pretty disappointed in what we were finding, nothing that struck our interest. Well after lunch I think the floodgates opened up wide. We went into three houses and found each of them to be somewhat fitting for us. Though after seeing the others we ruled out the first, it had a great finished basement, but because of that pretty much no storage space available.

The second house was cool, had a "man cave” in the back yard, which was just a really cool looking shed. The yard was amazing, it had a hot tub, though it wasn’t included in the house price. We liked this house, a decent garage, good looking out front. It’s asking price is 318k, and it really is a nice house, unfinished basement. With some research though it looks like the asking price is too high for the area, which means if we are going to offer it’ll be probably 50k less than asking, maybe. We may not even offer.

From there we headed to the best house we saw all day, if you judge the garage alone, it was a 4 car garage.

Though the front of the house didn’t do much, and Natalie didn’t care too much for the neighborhood.

After that we headed over to a neighborhood we’ve visited on the past two trips, and looked at our third house there, all three within literally a stones throw from each other. This one we found to be awesome.

3 Car garage, huge deck out back, hot tub, granite counter tops, lots of things we like. Then we figured out the bad part. This is yet again a Short Sale, with an asking price of $325k. Which to us seemed like a decent deal, but after some research I’m not so sure. It looks like there hasn’t been a house sold in that neighborhood above 300k since October 08, and even then not many have sold for above 300k in the past year. The house has an offer on it, and supposedly the bank is about ready to review the offer on Tuesday, so we may make an offer, but the more I think about it we will likely make a pretty low offer at this point. It concerns me that the price of the houses in the area is low. This house sold new in 2k5 for 370k. A brand new house we looked at on the first trip sold for 300k just a few weeks ago, brand new!!!

Here are more photos of the house and neighborhood.

 

 

Tomorrow we’re heading out looking at another 10-15 houses. We’ll see what we find.

So Natalie and I headed south from Fort Collins this morning with the intention of getting to Parker and looking at dressage barns. Well it was my intention, but I found out that Natalie hadn’t looked up any barns! After stopping at the So All May Eat Cafe, http://www.soallmayeat.org/, to say hello to my fraternity brother Brad (as much of a hello as my sick voice could muster) I started looking up barns in the Parker area with Samantha, our GPS.

I found a place called Trinity Sport Horse (I think) and headed that way, but just after getting off the highway in Parker I found a tack shop so I cut across 4 lanes and we went into the store to ask around for dressage barns in the area. The first place we tried ended up not existing, at least from what we could see. So then I looked up Stellar Stables using Google on my mobile phone, I plugged the address I found online into the GPS and we headed further south to see what we could find. We came across a big white barn on Daley road, at the place that the GPS told us that Stellar stables should be, but it wasn’t Stellar Stables, it was Saddle Up, http://www.saddleupfoundation.org/.

We stopped in there and met a lady named Sabrina who told us that Stellar was just up the road and that she boards there. She spends some time working at Saddle Up, which we found out is a therapeutic horsemanship barn.

We then headed up to Stellar Stables, home of the Dressage Dream team, www.dreamteamdressage.com, and ventured into the barn. It’s an amazing place. The trainer there is another aussie, and Natalie is excited about the potential learning opportunities that are available there at Stellar Stables. As of right now that is the barn of choice, so we started looking around Parker Colorado this afternoon for housing.

We ended up getting in touch with a Keller Williams agent, thanks Aunt Sandra for the connection! We got preapproval lined up through his mortgage guy and then spent a few hours driving around Parker looking at neighborhoods with the agent. We’re going to spend some time with him Wednesday looking at houses for sale and seeing what we can find in the area.

So far our opinions of Parker are that it is far more suiting for us than Fort Collins was. It is much more suburbia, like we are used to, with Denver only a short drive away. We haven’t stumbled on any trailer parks, which was something we couldn’t seem to get away from in Ft. Collins.

Our house hunting trip to Colorado is almost over, we’ll be back in St. Louis Wednesday at 10pm, barring any delays. We don’t expect to find a house in Parker just yet, so we will likely schedule another trip out here in April.

So this blog post will be an ongoing work in progress, while making some blueberry muffins this morning I started coming up with a list of things to check when we are looking at houses. I’ll continually update and edit this list.