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 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 one of the things you might find with twitter is that if you post messages on there you’ll find people start to follow you. Well lately I’ve been getting real estate professionals following me (http://twitter.com/christoc/) because I’ve been tweeting about Short Sales and other things in our hunt for a house in Parker Colorado. Today I visited one of these annoying twitter users and ran across an interesting link about the Short Sale process in the Napa Register (newspaper). While it doesn’t exactly show you everything involved with a short sale process, it does talk briefly about it, and what changes are available for the process right now.

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 earlier this week I heard from our Realtor in Colorado. He said the owner had accepted our second offer on the house and had passed it on to the bank for their review. Supposedly the seller’s realtor said he hopes to hear back in 7-10 days from the bank. I don’t know if I believe that or not, we’re not getting our hopes up. It would be nice to know soon, but only if we get it! At least if the bank turns us down we will know and can start looking for other options. With as busy as things have been since we were last in Parker we haven’t looked at other houses.

I did get a scare last night. I checked my voicemails for a new message and the message came across with a fax shrill, so I hung up and checked again. Well the first message it played was the voicemail from our agent from last week telling us that  the owner had turned our first offer on the house down. I wasn’t sure that it was an old voicemail, I thought it was from last night, so I called David up and asked him if he had called. Fortunately he hadn’t, it was in fact last week’s message. So I immediately went and deleted the voicemail, no more mistaking that damn message for a new one!

I’ll post another update when we hear more!

So Natalie and I have two days left here in Colorado, and we’re actually further from our goal than we were before we arrived last week.

After spending a couple of days driving around Ft. Collins we’re not convinced that FC is the place we want to move to anymore. It’s an interesting town, and there are some cool features, but we are not sure that those features outweigh some of the things that bug us.

We spent today driving around looking at Dressage barns near Longmont/Boulder, we found a few cool places. We’re going to head down south of Denver tomorrow and look around at some other barns down there. Based on what we find down there we will spend Wednesday either looking around there, or coming back up to the Longmont area. We want to spend some time driving around whatever area we think we will decide on and make sure we find out as much about the area as we can before making another trip out here in April to house hunt.

So far the Longmont/Bolder area a quick scan of Realtor.com doesn’t give me a good feeling of being able to find a house that will fit our desires. I only found a few houses that were under $350k, and I don’t think any of those had a 3 car garage.