Buying

Found 7 blog entries about Buying.

Early 2020 through early 2022 saw two of the busiest and unsustainable years of real estate activity ever recorded in Colorado and the nation. All-time low mortgage rates, population migration, and lifestyle changes drove unprecedented real estate sales volume and home value appreciation.

On January 6th of 2022, the year opened with interest rates at a historic low of 3.22%. The floodgates of buyers were thrown open and as many of you may have heard from friends and family who were making a move, the market moved at a lightning pace with homes flying off the shelf at above list price—in fact in April of 2022, 78% of all properties sold for more than the seller’s asking price, the highest percentage on record.

My fellow realtor friends and I knew

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Lindsey Friedman - Realtor - Colorado Home Realty

A home is much more than just a place to hang your hat. A home should be a space that “sparks joy” (if you have not read The Japanese Art of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo, I highly recommend!) and works for you financially by building equity. Recently, I helped a couple (25 years old) purchase a condo. Whether renting or owning, all the neighbors pay similar housing costs to be in a place they enjoy. A key acknowledgement they made was that as owners, their monthly payments are working for them, helping them gain financial stability at a very young age. Renters payments are going straight into a landlord’s pocket instead.

We all need a place to live and paying housing costs are inevitable. If you can qualify for a loan and put some money down,

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Lindsey Friedman - Realtor - Colorado Home Realty

As we end the summer season I hear rumblings from folks that the market is “cooling off.”

There is definitely a seasonality to residential real estate. It’s also true that there are both myths and realities that the data supports in connection with this seasonality.

 

One myth is that most resale home transactions occur during the first half of the year. The graphs below tell differently. 

  • On average, the distribution of closings per quarter is 19%, 29%, 29% and 23% over the last six years.
  • Most sales occur in the 2nd and 3rd quarters – 58% of all closings occur in this six-month period.
  • More sales occur in the last half of the year than in the first half of the year – 52% in July through December versus 48% in January through
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You can find out how to cover a text book using a grocery paper sack on YouTube (yes, my children’s school still requires text book covering), you can choose your next haircut off of Pinterest, and yes, you can estimate what your house might sell for on the open market using Zillow. The Internet has really dulled our problem solving skills over the last decade and now we can find an answer to just about anything using it. I love it when I’ve inexcusably forgotten the name of one of my favorite characters on Modern Family and voila! I’m smart again.

What does Zillow do for the home shopper/seller? I’m probably preaching to the choir, but It provides instant details related to any home, including your own, or gives you a list of homes for sale in a

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After a 75—minute visit to a UC Health Urgent Care facility during which my husband Jeremy was given intravenous pain meds and then sent home with a kidney stone, we received a bill in the mail for $4000. Seriously? Why do we even have Health Insurance? Public Service Announcement: NEVER visit a UC Health Urgent Care—another day, I will write a blog about the fleecing of Denver Metro families by these facilities.

Car insurance, Health insurance, Life Insurance, Dental Insurance, Home Insurance, Cell Phone Insurance, Pet Insurance, the list goes on and on. Might as well add another to the mix: Title Insurance. This type of insurance is actually pretty critical when you’re purchasing a home. Within your contract to buy a property, you will find a

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Where can the Millennials find a place to live in Denver now? I get this question a lot. Back in February I wrote a blog on Affordable Neighborhoods Near Denver, http://lindseyfriedmanhomes.com/2016/02/29/affordable-neighborhoods-part-i/. Before I wrote that post, I actually had to look up the definition of a Millennial- and sadly, I found out I wasn’t one. In October 2004, researchers Neil Howe and William Strauss defined the group as “those born in 1982 and approximately 20 years thereafter,” putting the range at 34 years of age to 14 years of age. That range encompasses a vast array of stages in one’s life- a 23-year old’s life and priorities typically look very different from a 34- year old’s needs and goals in owning a home. That’s what make this

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You might ask yourself, “Why does Lindsey from time to time send out a real estate snapshot showing a list of on the market and sold properties in my neighborhood? I’m not going to sell my house any time soon.” Why, it’s elementary! I want to make sure you are as educated as possible on the market- and not using 9News to arrive at your conclusions.

Housing averages, which generally irk me, do not tell the real story and are not predictive. It is more useful to study individual houses or neighborhoods over time, which can give you a much more reliable and granular picture of your local housing market.  As Alan N. Weiss, co-founder of the Case-Shiller Weiss housing market index and an expert on everything real estate data says, “Don’t be fooled by

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