Friday Potpouri - Boulder Edition

Greetings from sunny and warm Boulder, Colorado. As many of you know, we are previewing the Boulder and surrounding area real estate market in anticipation of buying here in the next year or so. All we have to do is sell our house, no small feat in today's markets.

These photos were taken today at the end of the street where we are staying, so it is a view of the foot hills and walking trails behind us.





Our search began with all price ranges as we wanted to see what was available at both ends of our budget and see what we features we will have to compromise on, i.e., location, size of lot, age of the home and how much work would have to be done on the homes to bring them up to par. We are lucky that our friends/hosts are also realtors so they are helping us with our search.

There is a lot of inventory at all price levels but there is an amazing amount of houses that have deal breaker defects even at the high end. Housing prices are all over the map and it is difficult to determine good value because of several factors. Many home owners are obviously still in denial about price. Another tactic that masks the deterioration in prices is that houses are withdrawn from the market after not selling, and then relisted with a lower price which makes it appear that the price had never been reduced. The effect is that it appears that the housing market is much more stable than it actually may be.

Our realtor friends feel that there also is a great deal of shadow inventory, homes that either had been withdrawn from the market for lack of bids or those who want to sell but cannot take the hit. They are able to pull up all past history for the homes we are interested in and there are many who are obviously underwater as their mortgage exceeds the current value of the house plus the price and listing history are also readily available. Very shocking to see a house that was originally listed for 3 million in 2007, just sold for 1.5 million and there are other homes that have taken huge hits.

We feel as if we are on our own private version of "House Hunters" where we are critiquing the homes; house one, older home that needs updating, with a large yard but not enough bathrooms, house two, backs up to a road, needs total updating, but has the best floor plan, and house three, small mid-century home with incredible mountain views but needs gutting. The theme that runs through most of the homes in our price range was "needs updating" and I am not just talking about paint and new appliances. Most homes we saw needed major updating; the few that didn't were 90's econoboxes that totally lacked character, usable yard or the neighborhoods were too densely built.

This was a good exercise for us as we now have a good feel for the neighborhoods that we would like to concentrate our search in, but also was somewhat depressing due to price and condition of the houses in our price bracket. We feel that there are a lot of desperate sellers as the listing agents were calling back with "we will do what ever it takes to make a deal", "make an offer any offer!", so it appears to us that there is a dearth of buyers in this market which suggests to us that the prices are going lower.

We do feel confident that we will find an acceptable house in our price bracket, eventually. Now all we have to do is sell our house!