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The easiest way to lower stress when you’re buying a home is to have realistic expectations. I’m going to go over the time frame that you can expect for it to take you to go from offer to closing. If you’re buying a home here in the mountains, I serve Summit, Park. and Chaffee counties. If you’re buying a home elsewhere, these time frames might be different for you. Time frames are different by market depending on varying factors.

You’ll notice a theme as I talk about all the different things that can impact our timeline. They’re all about how busy somebody is. So the busier the market is the longer things take. But before we can get your offer accepted you need to get pre approved.

This is the first step and I recommend budgeting a week before you’ve started talking to your lender. Because it can take as little as a day or two to get a pre approval letter. But, if your lender needs additional documents we want to make sure that we’re not expecting to go on showings on a Saturday, and you started talking to the lender on Wednesday and we don’t have your pre approval letter ready yet.

Real estate is a lot of hurry up and wait. We have to hurry up and get that pre-approval letter so that you’re ready. When we find the property to hurry up and put an offer in before they accept an offer from another buyer. Once we’ve gotten your offer accepted is when we then have to hurry up and schedule everything that needs to happen prior to closing. The short answer of how long it takes to buy a property here in the mountains is about 45 days and that is set from the title company.

So once your offer is accepted, we want to make sure that we schedule the inspections that we need for your contingencies as well as the appraisal from your lender and then the title company. So we hurry up and get all those things scheduled and we can get our inspection done in about 14 days. Appraisals are very, very dependent on how busy things are. Then there’s also some reason appraisers don’t want to appraise that property.

If it’s more rural, sometimes that can take us a little bit longer to get somebody who has time to drive out to that specific property versus doing a bunch of appraisals on a couple of condos in town. The number of appraisals they do determines how much they get paid. Sometimes on certain properties it can take us a little bit longer to get an appraisal ordered, but we want to put that order in as soon as possible. So that we can get it in time for them to be handed over to your lender. The lender normally needs anywhere from a week to two weeks.

Once they’ve gotten the appraisal back to get your financing done and once you’re finding interesting is done, we can close. Usually that takes 14 days. Then 21 to 30 day appraisal, which is roughly what we’ve been seeing the last couple of years. This can all fit within the 45 days that the title companies have been asking for.

Now, if it’s a slower time of year, mud season, either in spring or fall we might Be able to get it done a little bit faster if everybody is a little bit slower. But my recommendation is that you assume it’s going to take at least 45 days to close. So if you’re trying to buy a property prior to ski season you should start earlier in the fall.

Making sure to have time to find the right property for you, get under contract, and then close before you want to use it.

If you have other questions about buying property here in the mountains, please reach out to me. You can find me on social or my contact information is in the information box below.