Sellers, buyers, and what the market is actually saying (not what you wish it said)

I’ve been thinking a lot about what my job really is for you. It’s not to tell you what you want to hear. It’s not to make my life easier.

And it’s definitely not to put a pretty number on your house, toss it in the MLS, and hope the universe cooperates.

My job is to live in the space between what you want and what buyers are actually doing right now, and make sure you don’t light time and money on fire in that gap.

If you bought your Boulder house before 2010 for anything in the 500 – 750k range, you already won the game. You killed it. Congratulations.

The only real way to lose now is to get cute, overthink it, and let this win slip away while you “wait and see.”

Right now, you’re sitting on a home that’s probably worth 1.5 – 2M. The mortgage is almost gone or already paid off.

On paper, it feels safe to just sit tight. Here’s what some Boulder OG’s are thinking:

“I’m in no rush, my payment is tiny.”

“I’ll ring the register in a couple of years when the market heats up again like in 2021, 2022.”

But while your payment stayed low, everything around you changed. Insurance premiums in Colorado are up roughly 50-130% over the last decade.

Taxes and fees have followed. When we say “escrow,” I mean the ugly bundle that rides with your payment: property taxes, homeowners insurance, and sometimes HOA/metro fees.

None of that improves your house or raises its value, but it absolutely thins out the buyer pool that can afford your place.

I don’t need a quick sale. And maybe you don’t either. But without proper positioning and placement in the market, chasing the bid side down is a gamble that’s gonna cost you real dollars.

Every month your house sits, you’re paying the silent discount: taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance.

If you’re carrying two places, those costs double. That’s real money evaporating each month.

If rates fall from the 6s, sure, demand pops and selling gets easier. If rates rise, or just bounce around where they are, you’ve waited based on a guess and eaten two more years of higher taxes, insurance, and wear and tear.

Waiting based on what you hope rates will do isn’t a plan; it’s a wish.

For most people, figuring out your next chapter; what to keep, what to sell, where to land, what retirement spending really feels like is not a three month project.

Starting from scratch, it might be a year or more of decisions.

In my case, I had a heart attack in my fifties, an emergency double bypass, and said to myself it’s time to make a change.

It took me almost two years to decide, research, sell everything, and move to Costa Rica, and I do this for a living. Turns out that I only stayed there a year, but that’s another email.

Waiting to start that process is where I see people get jammed up.

In the next email, I’ll walk through a simple, ugly math example so you can see the difference between selling in the next year versus “just waiting a couple more.”

It’s not about fear; it’s about (maybe) not giving back more of a once in a lifetime win.

If you know ( or think you might be ) you’re in this boat and want to talk sooner, hit reply and just say ‘ OG ‘ and I’ll know exactly who you are.