The House Einstein Podcast is available wherever you podcast. Hosted by Osman Parvez and Hamish Crabb.

In this episode, we discuss the risks and tradeoffs that can get buried beneath luxury marketing. School closures could affect neighborhood demand, a proposed vacancy tax may raise the cost of owning a second home, Sundance could bring disruption along with opportunity, and zoning changes may eventually place denser development next door to properties that feel protected today.

We also break down Boulder’s restrictive development rules, house-size limits, changing lot standards, air-quality concerns, and why supposedly exclusive off-market inventory is far less common than some brokerages suggest. At the high end, pricing is often aspirational, inventory is abundant, and almost everything may be negotiable.

In Tales from the Trenches, an unusual basement storage room leads to a deeper investigation into the original construction of several Martin Acres homes.

Finally, we analyze several notable sales, including an ultra-luxury property that began at $12 million and eventually sold for $8.5 million, a nearby alternative that traded for $3 million less, and other deals illustrating how location, marketing, condition, and buyer urgency shape value.

Recorded Date: 7/1/26
Published Date: 7/3/26

Topics:

• WELCOME
  • Declare Mission: Entertain, Discuss Real Estate, Help You Better Understand the Market
  • Bios (Who We Are)
  • Disclaimer
  • Call to Action (Contact Us)
  • Review Topics Du Jour
  • Shameless of the Week
  • Newsletter

• THE CLOSING TABLE | What Agents Aren’t Telling You (Higher-End Buyers)
  • BVSD School Closures
  • Vacancy Taxes
  • Downside of Sundance
  • Future of Boulder = Higher Density
  • Rulebook for Development in General Is Extremely Restrictive
    • House Size Limits in County vs. City
    • Lot Sizes Subject to Change
      • Investment opportunity, or buyer beware of the areas most likely to see development?
      • Neighborhoods with smaller lots: less likely to be developed like crazy?
      • Are Newlands lots small enough to avoid this? Will it still remain a high-end king?
      • Will you have a duplex or apartment complex next door?
  • Massive Percentage NOT Under Contract
  • Pricing Is Mostly Aspirational and Completely Negotiable (Don’t Believe the Hype)
  • There Is Very Little Secret, Private Inventory
  • Air Quality Is a Real Issue

• TALES FROM THE TRENCHES | Basement Storage Surprise
  • 42nd, 43rd, and 44th
  • Cut Steel Beam?

• (LESSONS FROM) SALES OF THE WEEK
  • 440 Japonica Way
  • 1695 Orchard Ave
  • 925 Yale Rd
  • 325 Norton St
  • 3825 Telluride Pl

• SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
  • Osman’s Income Property Hunt

• CARVE OUTS
  • 4th of July
  • Tendons

• WRAP UP
  • House Einstein Newsletter (Call to Action)
  • Check Out Social Media (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, TikTok)
  • Visit HouseEinstein.com
  • Thank You for Joining Us
  • Feedback

• Additional Links
  • 440 Japonica Way
  • 1695 Orchard Ave
  • 925 Yale Rd
  • 325 Norton St
  • 3825 Telluride Pl
  • Bouldercast Air Quality
  • Bow Mar Gating Off Public Roads
  • 623 Terry St

House Einstein Podcast #125 Transcript

Cleaned from the Premiere Pro transcript export. 

Osman: A buyer walks in to an open house in Boulder, falls in love. The listing agent smiles and says, you should know. We've got two other offers coming in tonight, so if you want it, you'll need to go strong. Way over asking. The buyer panics. Writes the offer. Waives inspection, escalates 40 grand above list price. They win. Weeks later, at the closing table. The buyer runs into the seller and mentions how brutal the bidding war was. The seller looks confused. Bidding war. Yours was the only offer we ever saw. There were no other offers. There never were. The agent who legally represented the seller invented them to squeeze the buyer into a bigger number. And it worked because the buyer thought the agent was on their side. That's the setup. Today, we're talking about what it actually means to have someone in your corner. And with that, welcome to the House Einstein podcast. This is House Einstein Podcast 125, and I'm your host Osman Parvez. And with me is Hamish Crabb. Hello there.

Hamish: It almost sounds like a double-ended deal, where the listing agent is also advising the buyer.

Osman: Well, okay, we'll get into that.

Hamish: Yeah, let's.

Osman: We'll get into that because in the state of Colorado, there are disclosures that need to be given to a buyer and to a seller in the contract process that clarifies who is representing whom and what those interests are. But in the heat of the moment,

Hamish: We've got pleasantries first.

Osman: All right. Well, let me just finish a sentence and then I'll just say, in the heat of the moment when you are feeling the panic of possibly losing the property and you're skimming the contract to buy and sell. People often will just sign the disclosures very quickly and not think about what they actually mean. And so you submit, not realizing what you've just signed, especially in today's day and age when it's electronic signatures, it's super fast. And you're click, click, click, click, done. Yeah. And people just have no idea what they just signed.

Hamish: They give it the terms-of-service treatment or terms-and-conditions treatment where it's just go straight to the end. Right.

Osman: And they just skip to the end. And I'll add one more piece that in the event this ends up in litigation or even just a dispute, this is where certain signature systems have far better documentation than others. And DocuSign is the gold standard for real estate transactions. And a lot of agents in Colorado insist on using CTM because it's convenient and it's built in, but it's very easy for emails to be signed, forwarded to another party to sign. And you don't have the chain of custody that you get with DocuSign showing who signed it. What was your IP address? It's all included in the program, and CTM frankly sucks when it comes to that sort of thing. And in this sort of rush, rush, rush situation,

Hamish: I'll just sign for you. Don't worry.

Osman: I have literally had people say to us, Oh, no, I just signed for my wife and we have said, no, you didn't. I don't want to hear about that. And I need to send this to you now. And if you're doing something like that, first of all, don't.

Hamish: But don't tell me.

Osman: But for heaven's sake, don't tell me about it. But don't do it first of all. But if you tell me about it, we have a big problem. So anyway, I literally had somebody contact us to be their listing agent and start the process. And midway through the process of onboarding them, they messaged me and they said, I'm so sorry, but my wife has agreed to renew the listing agreement with our current agent. And I said, how did that happen?

Hamish: First of all, renew.

Osman: Like it was a stale listing. And we were doing a listing takeover. And I said, how did that happen? Don't you have to sign it? And he said, my wife signed for me on electronic signatures, which had to be CTM. Yeah. And the wife had clicked through it. So what? Oh, dude. Yeah. I'm like I said, I'm so sorry. And he apologized and I wish we had moved faster in the process. So there was some emails that had gotten lost in the chain, which is one of the reasons why, if you actually want to work with a House Einstein agent or frankly, any agent, pick up the phone and call us, but you will get instant attention. My phone number is everywhere. You might get voicemail, leave a message, send a text message. We do look at them, but because of all the spam, email is no longer the best way to reach us for a fast reply. And real estate time is of the essence in real estate transactions, so don't hesitate to reach out. You're never bothering me by calling.

Hamish: Good point.

Osman: All right, so with that, welcome to the House Einstein podcast. And this podcast is sponsored by the House Einstein Brokerage. Founded in Boulder, Colorado in 2013, the House Einstein brokerage's mission is to help you make a smarter real estate decision. It's what we live and breathe. And if you'd like to learn more about the brokerage, you can find us at houseeinstein.com. If you are a listener or viewer of the podcast, well, this is entertainment, so please don't make any real estate or any other decision on anything you hear in the pod. But we hope to entertain you with tales of real estate grandeur and tales of real estate failure. We are a learning organization, and increasingly we're going to start doing more postmortems as part of our structure. But let me walk you through our docket for today. Our core topic, the closing table topic is what agents are not telling you. So let's say you're planning you're planning to purchase real estate here in Boulder specifically. And you start working with an agent who, in theory, is representing you. Well, we've come up with a list of things that it's pretty likely they're going to gloss over, and that we feel it's really important. You should know upfront. And then our tales From the trenches segment is very fresh. I mean, last night, fresh on a deal that we are usually.

Hamish: Not the case. Yeah.

Osman: We're currently working on. I don't think this is going to be material in any way to the deal, but it's super interesting and our client hasn't fully decided on what to do with the situation yet, so or at least they haven't indicated to me what they want to do. But so we're not going to reveal the property address so that we can't tie it directly to the deal. But if you're really savvy, you'll be able to figure it out pretty quick. So it's really a surprise in a neighborhood I know so much about because I've lived there for, well, I no longer live there, but I lived there for almost 20 years. I know that neighborhood really, really well.

Hamish: Kind of proof. There's always like something else to learn.

Osman: We own investment property in that neighborhood. We've, we've served property management clients in that neighborhood. I've helped clients buy and sell dozens of homes in that neighborhood. I've served on the neighborhood association.

Hamish: Yeah. Like there's a neighborhood association. There is no neighborhood. Not a but.

Osman: It's it's a voluntary association. Okay. And did not know about this particular thing in the neighborhood. So we'll talk about.

Hamish: That a big stay tuned. Yeah.

Osman: It's if you're if you're into neighborhood histories, if you're into the history of Boulder, I think you'll enjoy that particular segment. And then, you know, we didn't talk about what we're hitting up for market updates. And we did a quick preliminary glance last week. I still think it's too early because of the Fourth of July falling in. So I think we're going to skip market update for the interest of time this week, because we're going to try to do a slightly shorter pod. We've got meetings coming up this afternoon and not a ton of time to get through it. So we're going to skip market update. But just my usual reminder. And that is anytime you see a market analysis online or email to you or sent to your mailbox, please look at it skeptically. Because real estate transactions, in order to really understand what's happening in the market, you have to get granular. That means street-level data on comparable sold homes and active competitors. Whether you're buying or selling, you need that information to make an intelligent real estate decision. And it is it is really granular and it has to be up to date. But big broad market statistics are interesting, but they're not particularly actionable.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: Shameless Self-Promotion. We're going to talk about an income property hunt that one of our important clients is currently on.

Hamish: Our favorite.

Osman: One of our favorite clients. Yes, absolutely. We're going to skip in the news. There's lots of stuff we could talk about and we're going to save it in the interest of time. Some of it's a little bit, I don't know, dry like we thought about talking about ballot issues that are coming up in the fall.

Hamish: And we probably.

Osman: Will we will be a time to talk about those things and EIFS to keep, you know, the vacancy tax or the $400 million bond issue that the city of Boulder is pushing.

Hamish: And imagine it at the same time.

Osman: Imagining how they're going to spend that money. I it's I mean, the hot take is what you.

Hamish: Probably.

Osman: Would expect us to say, but we're going to save it for a future podcast in the interest of time. And then, Hamish, I have no idea what you're talking about in carve.

Hamish: Outs to me either. Do you know what you're talking about?

Osman: I think I'm going to talk about Achilles tendinopathy and, frankly, the benefits of being hopefully temporarily mobility impaired. Like, it really shifts your perspective. That's a good one. I'll talk about that. I think it's relevant.

Hamish: I'll talk about the Fourth of July. All right. Yeah. That's easy enough.

Osman: All right. That sounds like a good that sounds like a good topic.

Hamish: Topic. Cool.

Osman: Okay. That's that is our docket of topics. And what do you say should we get into it?

Hamish: I think. Without further ado, those were good pleasantries. Welcome, listener. It's good to have you.

Osman: Yeah, thanks for being here. Okay, so you're thinking about buying a house in Boulder or Denver or any of our local markets here, but primarily let's focus on Boulder, because that way this is useful for those listeners that are in our local market and for whom we might serve. So if you find this interesting, reach out to us at houseeinstein.com. Stein, we're happy to give you straight talk. But one of the biggest things that is going to impact our market in the next year or two are school closures. So due to a variety of reasons, I would say the increasing affluence of our city, the which means typically older people are buying homes in Boulder, people that have already completed their child rearing phase of life like they're empty nesters. They're moving to Boulder as not quite retirees, but entering a new chapter in their life. Their kids are out of school, or maybe they've chosen not to have kids, but for all the reasons that many people already know exist, we are dealing with likely school closures.

Hamish: Yeah. And there's probably room for like us to have a hot take segment just on the school district, but.

Osman: On the school district itself. Yeah. So we're talking about Boulder Valley School District. But St. Vrain to a lesser extent, I think may also be seeing some of this.

Hamish: Jeffco too actually, for what it's.

Osman: Worth then your neighborhood as well as seen school closures and what is the impact. So on the on the real estate side, on the valuation side, people will preferentially choose neighborhoods on the basis of schools. This is not this should not be a surprise to anybody.

Hamish: Yeah no doubt.

Osman: And for example, Table Mesa has the best performing elementary schools in the city of Boulder, the best performing public schools in the city of Boulder. My personal take on that is it's largely because of all the federal labs that surround Table Mesa that you have. You have generations of scientists that have raised children in those neighborhoods. Right?

Hamish: So it's a situation where the parents are doing their homework and making sure their kids do theirs.

Osman: Homework, but they care about their homework. And so you're likely to have kids that have parents that really care about math and science scores, and you're getting them tutoring. And so it's not just the school is what I'm trying to say. And we have for many years, I have 20, 20 plus years. I have had buyers that will reach out to us that are moving to Boulder and tell me they have to have Table Mesa schools.

Hamish: And you've seen have you seen them make sacrifices in their ideal home just to be within that district? I feel like that happens all the time.

Osman: Oh, I mean, we had a listing a few years ago where that seller told.

Hamish: Us.

Osman: That he chose this house not because it was a great house, but because he needed the number of bedrooms and baths, because they had two kids and they needed those kids in Bear Creek. And so the Bear Creek Elementary beat out the house was frankly not great at all. We did list it and sell it.

Hamish: It was definitely a house.

Osman: We're not going to mention the address, but boy, that house was funky. It was not a house that we would have advised our clients by. Yeah, but we helped them prep it for sale and it was a lot of work to prep it for sale. And they were good listeners. They did.

Hamish: The they were great.

Osman: They did all the things we told them to do, and the property sold to exactly who we thought it would sell to people that really wanted to be in, in, in that school district. But if Bear Creek or Mesa Elementary were to close, it would have a huge impact on valuations and Table Mesa.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: Particularly I think at the mid-range of the market, like the more luxurious side of the market, those houses often don't have kids that are going to public school.

Hamish: I think that's maybe not so much like the demographic of empty nester, but like the lifestyle of it, where their priorities are kind of more away from the school districts in the, in the luxury segment or their private schools. Right, like Montessori or there's the friend school that's like kind of nearby here. I don't know the private schools very well.

Osman: Well, what's interesting is that not all the public school like their magnet schools, like there's community Montessori, there's a there's a lot of options for schools in Boulder. And we do help our clients figure out the options. Yeah. But for this particular focus, I think that what buyers should know is that there are certain schools that are likely to close, like Heatherwood Elementary.

Hamish: That's top of mind for me. Yeah.

Osman: And Heather would elementary historically has not performed as well as the core of Boulder. Or let me put it in another way, it's been an affordable option for a lot of young family.

Hamish: I was going to.

Osman: Say, yeah, that wanted to be in Boulder. Well, they wanted their kids going to Heather elementary, so the desirability of the neighborhood is going to go down if that elementary school closes. And so that's a big, big deal for people, whether or not they have school aged kids. And if you're looking to buy and within that price range of Heatherwood Elementary, for example, and you said, hey, Osman, let's go look at, you know, you sent us. Well, we send you listings and then we discuss them and you say, let's go look at these houses on Saturday. And Heather would I would pause and say, hold on a second.

Hamish: Are you.

Osman: To school? Are you aware of the schools closing? You really should know that there's a high probability, or at least a reasonable probability. I don't think it's totally said and done. I don't know if you want to look it up while we're talking. Like, is there an.

Hamish: Official think so.

Osman: It's in the works.

Hamish: That might count as our news segment. Yeah.

Osman: I think Whittier may also be another school that has some degree of risk. And I'm not an expert in which schools are absolutely on the docket to be chopped or not. Okay. And so don't panic. If you heard Whittier and your kid goes to Whittier. I'm not saying I know that for sure, but I've heard rumors of both Heatherwood and Whittier as possibly being no longer functioning in the future.

Hamish: Man, it sucks to see I had a middle school, actually a middle high and elementary school near me, all close, and they're redeveloping the elementary school closest to me with 40 single family homes, which we know how modern homes are, the very vertical, no backyard kind of. Yeah, they're going to trade totally independently of the neighborhood. But it'd be interesting to.

Osman: See, I mean, perhaps for sure that the people that project is targeting are probably not people that are going to have school age children. So whether or not you have school age children, the market value or the desire, the demand side of the neighborhood is going to see an impact from school closures. And that's something you should know when you're thinking about neighborhoods and price ranges that you're shopping in. And frankly, it's something you should know if you're thinking about keeping a home or selling a home. Let's say you own a home in the Heatherwood neighborhood, and you've kept it as a rental for years, and it's always rented a young families. Well, it may be harder to find tenants in the future, so you may want to think twice about keeping that rental property.

Hamish: Absolutely. And that's why, you know, if you tuned out because you heard schools, this affects everyone. So. Yeah. Exactly.

Osman: Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about the vacancy tax that the City of Boulder is proposing, and I believe it will be on the fall ballot in November.

Hamish: So to my understanding, there was like a movement that was pushing for like call it V1 of the vacancy tax. And that one was like, I think a little bit harsher and more focused on commercial spaces. And then the I'm quote unquote compromise is now removed, the commercial, but still sitting on the residential for vacancy tax.

Osman: Well, I don't want to get into the politics of how we got here. Okay. Really, I hear the high level. And yes, my understanding is that initially the people pushing for the vacancy tax wanted the commercial properties to be taxed higher as well, which frankly makes them more expensive, not less expensive. It's like it's like a failure to understand economics. I think they believe punishing Tebo is somehow going to make real estate cheaper. Like it's not. He's going to pass on that cost directly to and he can afford to wait with with their finances. So but so I think that was probably misguided to begin with. And it's been removed by staff, but now they're just focusing on the residency side. And on the residential side, These people have far less political power than the landlords.

Hamish: Especially Tebow.

Osman: And if it's vacant, they're not trying to rent it. So there's no impact to small business in terms of their cost structure to stick landlords to. Residential owners. We're really talking about second homes, right? We're talking about vacant second homes. And to stick those out of towners that want that bought a second home in Boulder are here for a brief period of time with an extra $1,000 a year is an easy yes, because the political power of those people is very limited. So and they're not enough votes there to protect those people. And they're wealthy because they own their affluent enough to own a second home in Boulder. So those people are in the political crosshairs. And for sure, that's I mean, I think it's almost certainly going to pass. So what's the impact to you as a potential buyer? Why is this important for you to know if you're thinking about buying a second home or a primary home, but let's say it's a second home here in Boulder. Let's say you heard Sundance is coming. So you're like, let me buy a second home. I'm only going to be there for a month or two a year, and the rest of the time we'll let a property manager take care of it. But I don't really want anybody living in my home, okay? This is like my home. I can afford to keep it vacant. I don't really care about the property taxes. They're trivial. I'll pay a management company to maintain it. Landscapers will come look at it. We've got cameras inside and water alarms. It'll be fine. Boulders. Low crime. There's very unlikely somebody's going to go squat in this luxury home that just sits there empty all the time. Why do I care about $1,000 tax?

Osman: You probably don't. It's probably not going to have much impact today. However, it sets a precedent. It sets a precedent that looks at you as a source to fix the budgetary gap. The deficit technically isn't a deficit. We can't have a deficit. We can't print money, but we can borrow money. It helps fill that gap in our funding that we desperately need. So what would stop? If we can get $1,000 a year? What would stop us from getting 5000 or $10,000 a year? When we're looking at a base price, that is almost certainly going to be north of a million.

Hamish: And this vacancy tax, I think, was kind of pitched to work for this backlog, right? This like 400, $500 million infrastructure forecasted backlog.

Osman: It doesn't cover the gap. That's that's the.

Hamish: But that was like that's kind of where it was born out of it. Feels good. Yeah.

Osman: It feels good to the affluent homebuyer with more taxes. They don't have any political power and they have money. So 100% it feels good. But will it actually have a meaningful impact? The answer is no.

Hamish: And on the housing market either like you know.

Osman: Well okay, so I don't I don't even if it's $20,000 a year, it's not going to stop the 3 to $5 million house market buyer. But it does set a bad precedent in terms of looking for second homeowners to fill our budget, budgetary mismanagement to fix our budgetary problems. And it also potentially puts at risk a whole nother group of owners that spend part of the year here in Boulder and part of the year elsewhere, and have spent their lives living in Boulder, paying into the system. And maybe now they spend half the year traveling or they're visiting family for half the year. I'm not entirely sure what the thresholds are going to be for what is vacant and what is not vacant. Yeah, but they're talking about this is the part that's the most disturbing. They're talking about using the water bill as. Evidence that the home is vacant.

Hamish: Such as set a sprinkler timer on a faucet and you're good. I mean.

Osman: You and I are digging exactly the same way. There's not a law against wasting water in your own sink.

Hamish: They love that. Yeah, okay. Especially Boulder.

Osman: But you got to ask her. You like, at what point is wasting water cheaper than paying the tax? And it's a it's an unfortunate thing I got. It's such a horrible thing to imagine people doing. But I think that there will be people that spite the city so much, they literally will be installing a sprinkler timer on their kitchen sink. Yeah. Although you have to also ask how much increase probability of a flood are you creating in your house? If for some reason that.

Hamish: You already have the property manager you know X, Y, and Z, right?

Osman: Yeah. If the sink starts overflowing and no one's there for six months, you're doing you're put your house in a self-destruct mode to save a few thousand bucks in taxes.

Hamish: Well, that's so I, I think for me, like, I kind of see where they're coming from with the text and, like, we're not. To be fair, this is like what your agent won't tell you segment, but, I think one, we kind of already established that it's not really going to make a dent in, like housing affordability. It's not really going to make a dent for the budget or anything like that. I do think there's totally going to be people trying to skirt it, like with a sprinkler timer or something of that effect. But, there's totally going to be a group of people that are like two grand, you know, I can do that. That's fine.

Osman: I think the point I'm trying to make is what your agent is not telling you is that there's a there's growing resentment.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: Good point. Affluent buyers from out of town who are not full time members of our community who are buying expensive real estate and, and basically land banking, but they're here for a brief period of time, and then they're benefiting from the attractiveness of our community without paying their fair share, which I would argue they're already paying property taxes, but they're not paying sales taxes that they might be paying if they lived here full time.

Hamish: Yeah. And that's true. Almost like its own second point is that so many people in Colorado you meet and they're like, I'm tired of name-a-state coming in here and, you know, changing Colorado. Like, since moving here, I've there's a sentiment of like, Colorado's full. And so if you're coming in from out of state for a second home, you're now being hit with like that general public sentiment, plus the growing dislike from the council and these taxes to kind of try and disincentivize you from putting your money here.

Osman: For sure. And that's something I think people are aware of it when it comes to tech workers. They know that there's backlash or has been backlash against Google and Apple employees. Like, we've had large tech companies open up offices here and relocate staff here to Boulder. And, and we have represented many of those buyers and sellers, and they are very sensitive to telling us where they work.

Hamish: Yeah, they are.

Osman: They are very hesitant to tell you that they work for Google or Apple or Facebook because they know there's resentment in the community. And this is I think this sort of tax increases that resentment. Yeah. It isn't necessarily going to diminish your real estate returns, but it's something you should be aware of if you're buying a second home in Boulder, that for sure your cost basis is going to go up in the future.

Hamish: I think just on that, on that note, it's funny because like, I have a friend and this will probably be a carve out topic who's moving to rent my basement from me, and she is from out of state and like the general public as a whole, is like all these out of state people moving in. But then anytime it's 1 to 1 or an actual human connection, it's like, Welcome to Colorado, you're going to love it. You know, it's such this like two sided, like groupthink versus actual.

Osman: I feel like it's a it's a bunch of cranks on Reddit. It's mostly cranks on Reddit. It's in person. It's there's very little actual resentment like you like when you meet people. Colorado is one of the Boulder's one of the friendliest places I've ever lived. Period. Full stop. And I know there's a lot of concern about the racism in Boulder and the prejudice people face in Boulder, but it's one of the least racist and prejudice places I've ever lived. And so it's really kind of shocking to see people's stories. Yeah, and hypersensitivity to it online. But in person I don't see it. So I'm often wondering what I'm missing. And I think it's mostly that it's crank driven. It is a minority of cranks. There's going to be a crank.

Hamish: Curve that you have to correct for.

Osman: They have a disproportionate voice online and they're creating a perception that really doesn't exist. But you should at least know that there is a potential backlash growing. Yeah. Real or perceived against wealthy people from out of town who are buying real estate here in Boulder. And that brings us to the next one, which is the downsides of Sundance. And, I will say that this is my personal opinion. This is not in representing the nonprofit boards I serve. This is purely just my personal opinion on the matter that given what I've heard of, what it's like, or it has been like in Park City, there's a lot of local backlash over Sundance in that community and including something called Slamdance, which is an alternate film festival for the locals because they're so annoyed at.

Hamish: Like, the unaffordable or.

Osman: Well, so the limited opportunities to attend film screenings, the extreme expense of attending film screenings, the fact that you can't get a decent restaurant reservation during that time period because they're all gone. Often the restaurants are fully booked by movie studios. All the venues are booked, so your normal, you know, you can't just stroll into a restaurant and expect to be seated that week, which may come as a brutal surprise for residents. And even if you volunteer or get a local's pass, they're sort of expensive and have limited opportunity to attend.

Hamish: That's a good point.

Osman: The locals may not have that are not actively involved or benefiting from Sundance. There's a high chance that there's going to be some resentment once the actual experience happens here in our community. And so that's very similar, that there may be some resentment. So if you're thinking about buying your you're affiliated with Sundance, you're in the entertainment community. You want to own a piece of Boulder. It's a fantastic place to live. We would love to work with you if that's your thing. Like we don't discriminate against our clients irrespective.

Hamish: As long as you're decent.

Osman: It doesn't matter what business you're in, it doesn't matter what your faith is or the color of your skin or your political affiliations. If you're a decent human being, we are happy to work with you. If you are rude to our colleagues or rude to anyone at the House Einstein team or obnoxious, than we would rather go somewhere else because we value our team and we do our best, but it's within our respectful boundaries. So, you know, I've seen swimming with sharks.

Hamish: As it should be. Yeah.

Osman: With Kevin Spacey. And that behavior was insane. And that's supposedly real Hollywood. I don't I don't really know.

Hamish: I haven't seen it. I did finally watch The Princess Bride though.

Osman: Excellent.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: Good. Good tangent. All right. So why is that important that you know that as a buyer here in Boulder, in particular, if you're a buyer that's affiliated with Sundance, you should you should be aware that there may be some backlash for Sundance purchases. You may also you may also want to know that there are quite a few potential upsides of Sundance, including the ability to leverage the income producing potential of your luxury home that you live in full time, that you chose to get a festival license for, and then get out of town because some of those rents are insane. And there are companies that specialize in the management of luxury homes just for Sundance. With that said, boy, if they're throwing the kind of parties I've heard get thrown for Sundance, your home may never be the same.

Hamish: Could take a good policy out, you know.

Osman: Make sure your security deposit is excessive. Yeah. And even then, plan for your home to be tracked. I personally don't think there's going to be a lot of Boulder homeowners that are like, sure, come party in my house, trash the place. I'll take 50 grand for that two week period or month, and I'm going to go to the Caribbean for that month, and then I'm going to come back to the house you destroyed and fix everything. That sounds like.

Hamish: I'm already planning a remodel. You know, you go and take care of demo.

Osman: Right hand.

Hamish: On the demo. Yeah. I think to, if you are looking to avoid the downsides of Sundance and circling back to, like, if your agent isn't even discussing with you the pros and cons of Sundance, you can't work with them to avoid possibly the most affected areas. And that's, I think, got to go down to the street, as we keep harping on, because the Sundance is going to be spread throughout the city. There's all sorts of things going on. But if you are like, this sounds like a nightmare, I need to find a house that's going to be at least affected. But still in Boulder, that's a reach out to your house agent.

Osman: That's something you might want to think about.

Hamish: For sure. Yeah.

Osman: Okay. So this is a this one has bugged me for years. It is bugged me for such a long time. And that is when I see agents who absolutely know better not warn their client about the rule book for development in the city of Boulder.

Hamish: That's true.

Osman: And they acquire property with the vision to do something with it, build their dream home, only to find out that this home is in, let's say, the hundred year flood, or this home has preexisting violations of the setbacks, which may cause city staff to not allow you to build your dream home that you want until you rectify the violations of the setbacks that already exist, or.

Hamish: Its.

Osman: Historic, or the solar access rules, or or the or the energy requirements of new homes, or it just goes on and on and on. So there are so many rules to development in Boulder, and the general principle that I recommend people consider is that if it's already built, you may be able to rebuild it, but not always if it's historic in particular. But there are so many layers to this. When I first moved to Boulder, well, sorry, the second time I moved to Boulder in 2005. I was shocked at the ordinance that was in the works called Compatible Development. And when it passed, which if you go back to those city council meetings, you might catch me in that meeting dropping a whole jar of change on the ground to represent the money involved. I mean, it was change, but it represented money that people don't realize they're losing in the development potential of these lots. And because you've put in place all of these ordinances that were intended to prevent large houses on small lots, you are squeezing the balloon. Large houses are suddenly worth a lot more money because you can't build them again. And we're in fact going to talk about some of those larger lots are suddenly worth a lot more money because they can support larger homes. And meanwhile, people whose retirement was based on selling their Boulder home could see a significant decrease in its value because it no longer held the building potential it once did. And so that sort of stuff sort of drives me crazy.

Osman: And when I see agents not advise their clients and I see that house come back to market 24 months later after they hired an architect after who advised them of the reality, after they tried to get something permitted and found out they couldn't. And they're like, oh no, I guess I should sell it. And they can't even get close to what they paid for it. I feel kind of bad. And I look at that agent, or at least their name, and with just sort of this like just astounded that the agent didn't warn their client, knowing full well what their client was, was attempting to do. And I know it's the agent because it's the same agent that's now listing the house. It's the agent that represented the buyer, not that represented the seller. Yeah. And it's an agent that's been in business in Boulder for.

Hamish: So you have a particular one in mind I. Mental architect.

Osman: And I could see her.

Hamish: Oh, don't gender them. You can see him.

Osman: I can see them very clearly in my mind's eye. And how salesy they are, how how typically.

Hamish: They know.

Osman: Right. We know who we're talking about.

Hamish: So I mean, so many pods ago, it's trivial. But we covered a story of this couple in Denver who bought, I think the home was like dang near condemned and they wanted to redo it. And sure enough, it was historical and they're like screwed. And it got all over nine news and everything and made the waves. But I mean, nothing changed. It's all we talk about it. Agents don't have a duty to do your due diligence for you, or even they're encouraged not to. And.

Osman: All right, I'm going to stop you there because I don't think that's accurate.

Hamish: Okay.

Osman: Agents have.

Hamish: Yeah, I'm wearing.

Osman: It a a duty to disclose proactively known defects. True. Okay, so if the House has an active water leak, and the agent walks into the basement and sees the water leak, they have a duty to disclose that even if they represent the seller, they have to disclose that to the buyer. It's a defect in the property. There are certain things that are not a defect, which in Colorado includes a homicide in the House is not there's no duty to disclose. Ghosts and the regulatory environment. There's no duty to disclose. But an agent that lives their professional life within the limits of their duty to disclose is not a particularly good agent. It's not an.

Hamish: That's exactly what I'm getting.

Osman: Any agent who doesn't take their fiduciary responsibility or their ethical responsibility seriously. Yeah. And there are there are people out there that will take your investment dollars. Right. They have I know some of these people that are happy to take your money as an investor in their startup, knowing full well that they're very unlikely to be successful and they pitch it with such fever. But when you catch them privately, they're full of doubt and they have no problem taking your money and using it to fund their lifestyle in the entrepreneurial world. And I've met these people. Meanwhile, I feel this massive sense of obligation, like if you were At House Einstein, we've never taken any investment capital, but we've been offered it. And the truth of the matter is the scalability of this company doesn't make any sense for outside capital. We're growing nicely and we're steady state and stable without outside capital. And if somebody dropped $5 million into House Einstein, could we go start brokerages all over the country with it? We could probably start brokerages in like a few more cities, right? Build them out and get agents on board and have a reasonable return of capital. But that's not why I'm in this business, is to build House Einstein as a startup company. Yeah, we're we're a steady state company that serves a unique client.

Hamish: Values, principles.

Osman: And I guess the point of all of this. Yeah, because it's not about House Einstein. It's about the mindset of the agent and how often they will not tell you what they know. And I'll just give you another example of this. This is me texting an agent this week is a little more Tales from the Trenches. I'm not going to mention the address, but it's a listing that's coming on market and based on the age of construction of the remodel looks very likely. It has EIFS, an exterior insulation and finish system. My message to the agent was do you or your client know if that exterior finish is EIFS? EIFS is problematic for a lot of reasons. Not a horrible product, but sometimes problematic.

Hamish: It's an increased area for diligence.

Osman: And this agents reply was the seller does not know if it's. My question was, do you or the seller know if it's or the answer was my client does not know if it's EIFS right? Which tells you what they know for sure it is even. Yeah, right. Like almost certainly.

Hamish: Both of. You start.

Osman: Yeah. And when we were talking about this with our client because they, they want this house, they asked why would they do that when it's very clear that when we look at the house or have an inspection, we're going to discover this. And the answer is that they're hopeful. You fall in love with the house, that you will so fall in love with the house so hard that you're going to ignore basic due diligence and not care. And maybe you won't care about this, or I think you should and should understand it and go in with eyes wide open.

Hamish: It's not a death.

Osman: No, it's not a death knell. Yeah, at all. But at least you should know. And it'd be better if you knew before we saw the house. So you could do your research on this before we even fall in love or not fall in love at the showing. Okay, let's keep going through this list.

Hamish: But, yeah, that's the whole thing is there's totally agents out there that will happily not tell you about any of these development rule books, get you in the house and then say, oh, no, you know, but I'll help you sell it.

Osman: Right? Well, later they'll help you sell it. And they're happy to collect two commissions. So house size limits is another big one. We talked about compatible development limiting house sizes in the city of Boulder. But more recently in the county they have passed house-size limits as well. And so larger homes once again are potentially seeing an upside value. Homes that once had expansion potential but no longer do are seeing downward pressure on prices. And so you should know before you write that offer on that house that you're envisioning expanding in the future that you may not be able to. And unless that moratorium expires and it is a big deal. So go in with eyes wide open. All right. Lot sizes. So we've talked about this quite a bit in the city of Boulder, due to the state mandating that communities reexamine all of their their zoning ordinances, there's a really good chance that minimum lot sizes are going to be downgraded, and we think they're going to drop to 5000ft² from closer to 7500ft² for most of the zoning in the city of Boulder. We're going to go from over a dozen zoning areas for residential property to two, and that's going to change things dramatically in the future. So why does that matter to you? I'm not going to subdivide this house. I'm buying. I don't care about lot size limits. We're not going to do that sort of development. I'll tell you why. Because you live next to somebody who might. And if you buy this house, let's say in Newlands next to that undeveloped lot, well, the person who bought that lot might be building a duplex, or if it's big enough, in parts of the south end of Newlands, there's a neighborhood that technically isn't Newlands, but people refer to it as Newlands that already supports high density development.

Osman: And at some point, some of these lots could turn into triplex. And so if you buy a nice, cute historic house next to what looked like a house from the 60s but is on a decent sized lot, well, you could be sitting at an apartment building next door in ten years.

Hamish: And that's. I'm really. I wonder if they'll pull off or pull back solar rules to or solar rights.

Osman: I think they're likely going to put it on the docket. I think it has to.

Hamish: That has to be. And I'm just hoping that's going to be ridiculously unpopular.

Osman: They have to reconcile state law. State law supersedes local ordinances.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: Which is convenient for certain politicians and political groups that are looking for political cover for these changes to the regulatory playbook that are probably not going to be very popular with a lot of long term residents who who have lived in this community for a long time. And so as a buyer coming in, you need to know that these rules are about to change so that you can look at with a critical eye at your property and the properties next door, and imagine what the future might look like. And while it's probably less likely in Newlands because of the expense of the lot, it's far more likely in Frazier Meadows, key Martin Acres, the baseline neighborhood where it may just make sense to demolish two homes in a row and build an apartment building like it's going to change. And you need to understand that where the homes are most affordable and the lots are larger, have a giant target on their on them for future development.

Hamish: Yeah. Thinking of that duplex that we covered in sales of the week a while ago. It's just across from the public library, down there and kind of like that neighborhood. I feel like we'd see a ton of those. It wasn't Chicago neighborhood, but,

Osman: Sorry, I'm confused about what property you're talking about.

Hamish: Oh, it's like a kind of oven guard. Like modern contemporary.

Osman: Dude you're talking about down by the by the main library. Yeah, yeah.

Hamish: Yeah, I think we'll see a lot of that kind of stuff, too.

Osman: You could. Yeah. That's a good example of a luxury duplex. Yeah, 100%. I think that if there's a market for it, there'll be somebody who attempts to build it, and maybe it's fine, maybe you'll love it or maybe you won't. And our mission is not to make that determination. It's to make sure you go in with eyes wide open.

Hamish: Totally.

Osman: And it's not just what exists today, it's what's likely to exist in the future. Yeah. Okay. We've talked about this one. Yeah. We're in times. But I want to hammer on it one more time. And it particularly applies to the high end where there is the most smoke and mirrors in the marketing world of homes imaginable, where aspirational pricing is typically the strategy that listing agents and the sellers will take. And what you look, what you see is a lot of buzz, social media buzz, marketing dollars, high end videos, trick high end videos, broker opens, AI look like giant parties. I just sent you one for next week that I can't go to. Oh, that's to mention.

Hamish: And I might be able.

Osman: To do that. Broker open it. Looks like. Look, there are a lot of fun. There's booze, there's prizes, there's music, there's sponsorships from local car dealerships and luxury brands. And it's all to create a whole bunch of buzz for a home that is often priced really high as part of its positioning in a potential buyers mind of what this home is worth. And there have been some examples of this where they started at really high numbers and cut the price 30 or 40% within a month, like shockingly cut it first they priced it really high and then they cut it and they know they're cutting it so that the buyer's agent or if they're unrepresented, the seller will say, boy, we were priced at 15 million just a month ago or last year. They you know, they've already cut the price, 5 million from their original, their original list price. And that original list price was we used to call this the dumb money. When I worked in the investment community, where you hope somebody would fall in love with what you're pitching and your skill in pitching, and not actually do their due diligence and valuation. Not doing back of the envelope, not do a discounted cash flow analysis. Not value the property or the asset in this case, companies on the fundamentals, but based on the g wiz factor.

Hamish: The charisma from the seller.

Osman: And look, a lot of companies are valued on growth. Right back in the.com era, there were companies valued on eyeballs, which was the most crazy metric imaginable, right? The easiest fake metric you can imagine. And at the high end of real estate marketing, over 90% of the listings are not under contract. That means 90% of the sellers are hoping you're going to take a look at their listing, fall in love and start the negotiations. And it doesn't matter how much the listing agent wants you to believe that this home is priced right, it usually isn't. It's usually priced really high, and they're hoping somebody's in the honeymoon period of the listing, will write a list, will write an offer close to the list price, and get this deal done fast because that's in their best interest. What they're hoping does not happen is that they're on the market for six, nine, 12 months, 2 or 3 years of long term relationship with the seller where they're maintaining the house, they're dealing with showings, they're trying to create buzz around a sale listing, and they're just chasing the sale price down. And we've got a couple of examples of those when we get to our sales of the week segment.

Hamish: Of.

Osman: Homes that were multi-year marketing EIFS that eventually sold for a massive discount to what they were originally listed for.

Hamish: And that kind of hits. The next point, right, is the pricing is mostly aspirational and also completely negotiable.

Osman: At the high end.

Hamish: Yeah, big asterisks.

Osman: Not all price points and locations, but at the high end. If you are not hearing that from your buyer's agent, get a better agent. One that will tell you the truth about the marketing, the truth about the market understands marketing of luxury homes and will actually act as a backstop to your emotional potential decision making. Because it's very easy to fall in love with these sexy high end homes that there's always another one, and often they're grossly overpriced. And if your agent isn't trying to talk you down, they're not doing a.

Hamish: Good job. They're thinking about their commission.

Osman: Yeah, they were like, oh my God, yes, this house is amazing. Absolutely. It's worth 9.5 million.

Hamish: You get this. I won't work all the for the rest of the year. Right.

Osman: Yeah. You get this I can take the rest. I can take the second half off.

Hamish: Yeah. And that's. Yeah. Well, you got air quality in here.

Osman: I do, but before we hit that. Oh, you hit one more point. And that is there is very little secret private client inventory. And it's usually not in the seller's best interest to only market their homes within their brokerage. And that is a common approach that some brokerages, particularly compass, uses. And you should be really careful believing that story. It's true. Occasionally there are homes sold through the private client network, but it's a tiny fraction and we can show you that data at any point in time, I will pull up the last 20 or 30 transactions. Compass is subject to putting their sales on the MLS, so you can see what percentage of them are double ended by compass agents. And when you see how few it is, you'll understand that this is this is fiction, and it's not even in the seller's best interest other than potentially the test the price.

Hamish: But even then. But that's not the whole market.

Osman: A bad way to sell.

Hamish: A house. So okay, exclusivity is attractive. It's sexy, but it's not. Yeah.

Osman: All right. This last one is air quality because it's so present right now. We're experiencing pretty poor air quality on the Front Range, mostly due to the fires. But what many agents will not tell a relocating buyer is that smog has been an issue for a long time, with or without the fires. And if you have respiratory issues or respiratory sensitivities, you may want to be careful relocating to the Front Range. And you may also want to focus on HVAC systems that have higher levels of filtration.

Hamish: That are designed for.

Osman: Design, for filtration from from the get go. Because you may find yourself in a situation like we do right now, where my throat is feeling a little heavy and my sleep is poor because of the air quality. And yesterday my wife worked out at the gym and she went running on a treadmill because she and she never runs on a treadmill because the air quality was so poor here.

Hamish: In even in the mountains.

Osman: Even in the.

Hamish: Mountains.

Osman: It's bad. Yeah. Often we'll see where we live, which is at 7200ft. It's about 2000ft above the city of Boulder. When there's no smoke, we will sometimes see that low lying ozone layer that you can't actually see when you're in town.

Hamish: But that's.

Osman: Yeah, I love living in Boulder. It's still one of the most beautiful places to live with some of the friendliest people, still relatively low taxes. All of these reasons to live here. Major airport hub, outdoor recreation, fantastic university. But the air quality is not one of the reasons to move to Boulder.

Hamish: I do have a silver lining. Or during the Fourth of July there were air quality monitors throughout. Did you see this?

Osman: I saw those charts. Yeah. They fascinating.

Hamish: Yeah. When fireworks went off, Boulder was the only one where the air quality improved. And everywhere else the I think like 2.5 parts per million segment just like shot up. But, yeah, Boulder is a valley. And so that kind of pollutant and everything does somewhat get trapped in the whole front range.

Osman: But that series of charts which was put together by Boulder cast.

Hamish: It was Boulder cast. Yeah.

Osman: We're fascinating. So maybe we could provide a link in the show notes to it. I thought that was cool. Cool, where you could see how Boulder actually did not see the big spike in, right in poor air quality that many other communities did. And I, I, you know, I'm going to sound a little elitist when I say this, but buying a bunch of fireworks and shooting them off in your neighborhood cul de sac is really annoying. And in Boulder, you're going to be the price of the neighborhood for doing that when our fire risk is so high. But there's lots of other communities where it's probably cool and people don't care. And so I think it's also a visible and observable effect of the pressure that Boulder is going to put on individuals to not be dumb, because you're going to get shamed in Boulder for doing things like this.

Hamish: Yeah. This is the not a, not a really a general statement, but this is kind of the type of place where if you think like you'll be cool for that, you're going to get kind of ousted almost.

Osman: I mean, for, for a while I, I'd write about this in my, in my blog when there were people who were charged with animal cruelty related offenses. Right. There was a college kid who duct taped a dog or a cat to a fridge and got arrested for it. There was a real estate agent who died her poodle, Hot pink, and was caught walking the poodle from her car by the cops. Both of these instances ended up on the front page. Okay, because Boulder, if anything, we deeply care about our pets and anything that even smells slightly like animal abuse. You are very likely to going to be tarred and feathered yourself. And not just in Reddit, but on the front of the daily Camera, because we it is that offensive to most Boulder rights, including to me. Okay. And that agent I think has actually changed her public name so that like when she meets new people, that her name doesn't show up when they search for her because her public record has this story.

Hamish: It was so.

Osman: Her being. Yeah, I mean, she made a bad decision. And when somebody makes that much of a bad decision, you have to ask yourself, do you really want to use this person as your agent? Because she no longer goes by the same name as she used to in that article, and I'm not going to say anything else, because I don't want to diminish her privilege to clean up her past. And people make mistakes in life. They they deserve an opportunity, in most cases to redemption. Yeah. Those cases we're going to get into a dark subject, but I have some pretty draconian beliefs when it comes to punishment for people that commit certain types of actions, particularly against pets and children. Like this is a very I get it. I'm with the Boulder rights that want to tar and feather you forever, or cut off body parts for certain behaviors, right? Like sounds like, which sounds very dark and medieval, but I'm their man when it comes to kids especially. Yeah, I'm sorry that's where I'm like in a into punishment. That's would be considered cruel and unusual. I have a.

Hamish: I have it's the Eighth amendment from not mistaken.

Osman: For certain things. I have a overdeveloped sense of vengeance and or overdeveloped sense of karmic justice needing to be served. But I also subscribe to the belief that karma is not your.

Hamish: Yours to.

Osman: Destroy, not yours to dish. Yeah, and the universe takes care of itself, like the people that behave poorly, unethically, even if they accumulate financial abundance, are not necessarily going to have happiness in their lives. Like there's something out there that creates there's some sort of balance in the universe that dishes out its own punishment.

Hamish: Its own type of.

Osman: Just need to get obsessed with it.

Hamish: Okay, okay. All right. Speaking of obsessions, no, there's a better. Do you have a segue for this one?

Osman: Tales from the tales of the trans. Yeah. You're keeping us right on time, Hamish. We're really going to kill it.

Hamish: I'm working on it. We are over our average for the closing table, but because it's a shorter pod, we're going to be fine. All right. Okay.

Osman: So tales From the trenches is the segment of the podcast where we talk about actual real estate transactions and the things that sometimes happen in them. And this week I attended an inspection. And in the inspection, one of the concerns that came up was the storage room beneath the garage for a basic Martin Acres ranch with a basement. And for those of you that know these basic ranches, there are many of them there throughout South Boulder and throughout Boulder, but mostly South Boulder. It seems Martin Acres is filled with them. This is a post-World. World War II community, and it was relatively affordable when it was constructed. I think the basements were like a $500 option for most of the neighborhood when the developer started. And in one of the later phases, this is Martin Acres two, it turns out. So let me tell you what we discovered on inspection. What we discovered on inspection was that the garage, the room beneath the garage was supported by steel beams and posts, two steel beams, two posts, one each. Each of those steel beams have one post on them, and then the other end of the steel beam is supported by the foundation wall.

Hamish: Okay.

Osman: And that steel structure is supporting a thicker than typical concrete slab above you. And when you look up, you see what looks like a wood grain pattern on the concrete, which is the wood form that was used to create this structure. So I believe what occurred is that rather than build a foundation that stopped at the garage wall, the foundation continued. Yeah. And then to build the garage, they put in place these this steel structure and then put a concrete floor on top of it or ceiling if you're in the basement looking up, that's a ceiling. And it almost certainly filled with rebar and hopefully support. Right.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: That's that's just mortar and concrete. It's actually rebar reinforced cement. Yeah. In this particular house, I didn't recall seeing any cracks or anything like that. But the inspector called it out and said, this is unusual because he's steel beams are cut. And when it comes to this type of construction, you're not supposed to cut steel beams. And he had I touched the edge. And sure enough, there it felt like it had been cut with a blowtorch.

Hamish: Okay.

Osman: And it wasn't quite the full length of the slab above it. It was leaving a couple of inches on its side, exposed.

Hamish: On the side, supported by the post. Right. Okay.

Osman: Yep. On the side, supported by the post. And so my client and I were advised that we should have consider having a structural engineer evaluate it. And we discussed that in the driveway. Like what does that look like? What does that cost? Maybe the cost turned out to be twice what I thought it would cost. I thought it would be a $250. A letter turned out that the responsive structural engineer wants $500 for a letter, or 2500 to 2500 if you want him to do calculations to tell you how much that thing can support. Wow. And it looked like an add on and it looked like an improper add on. Afterthought after. Well, by by an owner sometime in the last 70 years, somebody built this and I thought maybe it was built as a bomb shelter. We've seen that in Boulder. In fact, our listing, one of our listings had. That's right on Dewey had a.

Hamish: Two listings in.

Osman: Was it on duty? It was on alpine. Yeah. Alpine had a bomb. An actual bomb shelter. This looked like a bomb shelter. And our initial thought was somebody one of the owners in the last 70 years built this. They excavated. They built this because of what the inspector felt was not proper engineering or that the beam had been cut. And so what I did last night was I looked for this particular square footage in the basement, which is an unusual number, and I searched just for that number. 1350 is the number just in Martin Acres to see how many 1350 square foot basements have sold throughout the MLS history. And it turned out there were over 30 of them. And when I looked at when I looked at the map of where they were, they are on 42nd, 43rd and 44th Street, with one outlier on Morehead and the one outlier I ignored because it's Moorhead, its way to the northwest. Yeah it's not it doesn't line up. The rest of them are all here. 33 of the. Cluster transactions are all clustered on 42nd, 43rd and 44th Street.

Hamish: Are these you said Martin Acres one and two. I guess it was in two phases that it was developed.

Osman: Martin Acres was not all developed at one time. In fact, Majestic Heights used to be part of Martin Acres, and so did the neighborhood on the west side of Broadway that's now right below Dartmouth. And that neighborhood also was part of Martin Acres, originally.

Hamish: The Monkey Wrench Gang. Anyhow, Carry on. Sorry. Okay, so.

Osman: All right, so that tells me. Told me what? That the square footage is identical in a lot of houses on these three streets. So then I started looking at the photos of these old listings. And as as you move through time, the photos get better and better. And as we got nearer to current day, there were three listings that actually had a photo of that storage space under the garage, and all three of them showed very similar, almost, I want to say identical, but the angles weren't quite 100%, so I can't say there.

Hamish: But like the technique maybe.

Osman: Used, I saw the beam, I saw the post, I saw the beam not going the whole length. And in one photo in particular, in 2024 there was a sale where they had the owner had installed really bright lighting, and the listing agent or photographer had taken a photo of exactly that space, and it is almost virtually identical. And I sent it to the client last night and I said, you know, with this information, over 30 identical square feet and three of them have this exact or very close to the exact structure. And one of these photos looks almost exact. I think it's safe to say this is original installation. And it is. Even though the beam was cut, it was cut in 1959 or 1957 by the builder, who probably ordered a bunch of steel beams as an option and said, I'm going to order 50 steel beams and I'm going to cut them all right on site in half, and we're going to use this as an engineering for the, for the for the space under the garage.

Hamish: And what I'm thinking too is like probably they only ordered like one size of steel beam for the, the typical.

Osman: The size of it's on the truck.

Hamish: Yeah. And then they just cut that you know to make it fit.

Osman: Exactly. They cut they probably cut them in half or they cut. They cut the end off they didn't need and used it for something else. And when this was originally built in the 1950s, there probably wasn't an engineering study required.

Hamish: They were just like, let's go. Like.

Osman: Yeah, we know what we need to support that. Garage cars weigh X amount. We're going to build steel beams and steel supports, which will easily support that weight. And we're going to warranty the house whatever period of time the foundations and homes were warranted when they were first built. And these the photo of the 2024 version of this house. Different address. Yeah, it looks perfect. And when I looked at the house last night, I didn't see any cracks in the ceiling. It looks perfect, so I don't think they've moved at all. And the takeaway is that what was a concern which we had started to spitball, how do we solve this? Right. An engineer's letter for I was hoping it was 250. They won 500. Would give the buyer confidence. Who pays for that, I think, and I'm not 100% sure we've reached agreement on this, so I don't want to overstep my bounds. But if I were the buyer personally, at this point, I would feel like this is satisfied. Its original construction, it stood still for 70 years. What do you want the seller to do about it?

Hamish: Yeah, right.

Osman: If you know that asking them to produce an engineering report, you know you can. If that's something you want to ask for, that's something we will ask for it. My client makes the decision, but if I was the buyer, I would feel reasonably confident at this point that this is standard issue.

Hamish: Yeah. And that's where I'm like cars in the 50s were huge cast iron blocks and steel body panels. And I feel like comparably weighed, similar to like an EV. And anything else would be lighter. That's somewhat modern, you know?

Osman: And honestly, people don't even put their cars in these words. Yeah, right. Like mostly today they put bicycles and camping gear and skis.

Hamish: Or a bedroom or permitted.

Osman: Yeah, they sneak in and unpermitted bedroom. Like it's probably not going to have a car in it that often. And even if you can squeeze a car in, it's like it probably weighs close enough to the same. Probably not a concern, but keep an eye on that ceiling if it starts to crack. You have a structural issue, but this one isn't cracked and it's been there for 70 years.

Hamish: Yeah, and there's engineers that don't cost nothing, but they can help.

Osman: So that's our basement storage surprise. Even in a neighborhood that I've known for as long as I've known Martin Acres, that this little feature exists.

Hamish: That is a very cool find. It's like, yeah, I just love little bits of law. About the neighborhood and, you know, the models to. I guess when you looked at all these homes, 13 50 square foot in the basement, were they all different models to like? They weren't all Martin or anything.

Osman: They all.

Hamish: Look the same. Okay, interesting.

Osman: Yeah, I'll send them to I mean, there's some minor cosmetic differences on the exteriors. The interiors show different degrees of renewal. And of course, you're looking at a time series. Yeah, just the 42nd, 43rd and 44th Street over. You know, starting in the 90s when we started to see digital photography. And the MLS still retains data into the into the mid 90s. So we're looking at 30 years of data, roughly 33 sales. Some of them are repeats.

Hamish: That's pretty cool.

Osman: But the concentration is really clear. It's just these three streets. So if anybody is alive back then and part of our name in Martin Acres neighborhood and remembers when these homes were first sold because there are some original owners still in the neighborhood. Yeah, we've had them as neighbors when we lived in the neighborhood that bought originally when they were 20 years old, they bought a house. They were schoolteachers they could afford to buy in Boulder, and they bought a home, and they lived in the community that long. They may have an actual memory of how these streets and these homes on these streets were marketed back.

Hamish: Yeah, that's really cool. Thank you for sharing.

Osman: Okay, we're now moving into our lessons from sales of the week, and Hamish has not had as much time to review these as normal. So you're really going to get some instant hot takes on these properties as we go through them. Should we. Go high.

Hamish: To low or low to high like we did?

Osman: I think we're going to go right to high to low. We're going to start with the most salacious and expensive deals that closed last week. And I want to mention that sales of the week is intended to educate you on price, range and location. Things that we deals that we feel are notable, but also sometimes just deals that we think are interesting and fun. Yeah. And sort of sometimes head scratching in terms of where they ended up. So this first one is for 40 Japonica Way. It's a home that was built in 2023 and lived in by the developer the Martins and that and Dennis and their names are here in the listing. So it's not like I'm outing them. And they spent quite a bit on developing this house. They bought it. They bought the land for 1.355. Let me see. Was there a house on it back in the day? So when they acquired it, there was a house. It was a 60s era by level, nothing particularly remarkable other than the 12,000 square foot lot it occupied, which allowed the developer, even under compatible development, to build a 5200 square foot modern home that I would say is sort of modern farmhouse style. Yeah, right. That was when it was popular and they finished that project in 2023. It features five bedrooms, five bathrooms and a two car attached garage. Now it's at 5244ft². It had a nice big solar array on top, built to be net zero from an energy perspective, and used geothermal heating and cooling and a bunch of other things, including millwork and designer lighting from all over the world.

Osman: So impressive. High end appliances, high end windows, you know, savant, smart home tech, Lutron lighting, all the things, all the goodies that you would expect to see in a high end house. And then they decided to go ahead and list it, and they did so in April of 2025. So this is over a year ago, a year and a couple of months. And they listed it at an eye watering $12 million, which Mr. Market said no thanks. Absolutely. And very quickly after listing it. Well I would say two really quick. Two months later they said, okay, let's cut it to 11 at the beginning of July a year ago, and maybe that'll make a difference. It didn't surprise. And you know, that's what is that word when you get the, reveal or the when people have tell you something that they shouldn't tell you, like they reveal the ending of a story, a spoiler. Spoiler alert. Thank you. The one is not. Spoiler alert it didn't sell for 12 million. It also didn't sell for 11 million, which they had cut it to by the end of August. And actually, no, they cut it even further, yet they cut it to just under 10 million at the end of August.

Hamish: Same agent.

Osman: Great question. And we don't like to dish about the agents involved, but it went from I think they actually switched agents. Nope. They stayed with the same agent. Okay. So they are loyal and they stayed with their agent. Yeah. And honestly, it's not the agent's fault that the market is not responding to a $12 million listing when it shouldn't be priced that high. So they pulled it off the market and refreshed it at the At in February of this year. So refreshing. It's a very common technique. And the idea is that with some new photography and a new price, it might get renewed interest. In this case, I don't think they change the photography at all. It's the same photo in photo stack for the refresh. Kind of not, you know, we usually say at least give the house a new appearance if you're going to refresh it. But they didn't. And the house was relisted at 9.5 million in February of this year. In March, they cut it to 8.7 and finally in July. So finally in June, it went under contract and it sold for 8.5. So the final discount on the list price was 200,000. Below list pretty reasonable discount on an $8.7 million starting point. And it did sell for over 1500 a square. It sold for 1621 square foot. So I still think that's a phenomenal price point for a home that is not brand new, but pretty darn new and features a lot of desirable features and frankly, a very elegant design.

Osman: So let's talk about the design. Clearly there was there was some high end design work, like the finishes and fixtures throughout are very fetching. And the content. Yeah, yeah. And all of its current and, and the pool house experience in the backyard is super cool. And one of the nice things about being on the in a cul de sac is it's sort of narrow on the front, but the backyard typically feels pretty darn wide. Yeah.

Hamish: You look at the like parcel maps and you can always see around the cul de like a narrow where your driveway comes in, and then you get a like usually a nice backyard. Yeah.

Osman: But really the money shot of these listing is that the way the house flows out to the pool and the privacy of the backyard, and because of compatible development and other rules, building a house like this is actually really challenging. To cross 5000ft², get a five bedroom, five bath, the location which we really should have led with, but we'll just mention it is super desirable. So this is north of Newlands. Iris, Hawthorne, Juniper and Kalmia are the most desirable streets, Linden to a lesser extent because of how busy it is. So Linden doesn't really count the same way, but Iris, juniper, and Kalmia, you go from a neighborhood that is mostly north, sorry, mostly east west oriented. So the vast majority of Newlands is east west, and you cross into a neighborhood where the lots are larger and are typically north south oriented, and you get so much more privacy. It feels like a forest of luxury homes. And there are more coming, right? There's plenty in development in this neighborhood, so it's well supported to cross the $5 million price point. But of course, there's lots and lots of options that buyers have in this price point. But this particular house is fetching, and it's sort of also a stunning downturn in its value from a perceived value at 12 million a year ago, 14 months ago to selling it 8.5. Right. So this is the world of ultra luxury. This is the reality of ultra luxury houses that most agents would rather you not know about..

Hamish: Before I started showings and, you know, working in this market, driving through, I never would have guessed what was in that neighborhood. And on those streets, it's completely hidden.

Osman: It's hidden. And in fact, some of these homes are designed very intentionally to be extremely private. Yeah, but the thing most agents are not going to tell you is that at this price point, a 30% off sale from the original list is not actually that uncommon. And the number of homes that have sold in this price point are going to be a handful. So you really have to have a sense of the value of your time to recreate this type of house. It would take you probably two years soup to nuts, and that's if you have your land already acquired, your architect and builder already selected, and a good sense of what you want in the design process. Because building in the city of Boulder takes a really long time, and typically the expenses are much more much higher than you ever would have guessed. And I think these people that acquired the house probably got a decent deal at 8.5, provided that the quality of the finished product is really is really high, and after three years you should be able to tell whether it's holding up well or not, like it's aged enough to start, start to show some blemishes in its design.

Hamish: And the teething.

Osman: Right. The major initial issues should now be through, and you're buying something that's completely turnkey. And here's the other thing I would advise people that were our clients is to actually ignore completely that $12 million. Like it's. So here's the thing. It's so hard to disconnect yourself from price anchoring in a negotiation because the listing agent and frankly, your agent two is probably going to tell you that it was originally listed at 12. And man, they're taking such a loss. They're not. They should have priced it right to begin with. And it takes a long time to sell homes. And that aspirational pricing is part of the marketing strategy.

Hamish: As a buyer, it feels great to say, yeah, they were at 12 and we got it for eight and a half.

Osman: Yeah, you can go brag at your cocktail parties about that. But honestly it.

Hamish: Those are no, no.

Osman: It's gauche like in certain circles to talk like that. But I mean, having spent time on Nantucket, I will share with you that the old money would, would frown pretty heavily at you talking about pricing. But the new money.

Hamish: That's all they do want to.

Osman: Talk to, to talk to you. They would want you to first know how much they paid and know how much of a discount you got.

Hamish: And how much they could have paid you. Right.

Osman: But they were so savvy they waited.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: I mean, it's okay. Like there are alternatives. And this is something I will do in the next newsletter. It's delayed. We've been very busy at How Science sign, but I'm working on the next newsletter and I like to show comparables like what else you could have, what else you should look at. And there's certainly lots of homes you could have looked at as alternatives to this. But from a privacy perspective and proximity to both downtown and seniors, the locations are really clutch. It's definitely a big step up from Newlands, which itself is a very desirable location, and you're still maintaining close proximity to downtown and ideal, and not even that far from Lucky's so pretty cool spot, and will feel like a little hidden forest adventure when your guests come to visit you, because it's very lush and protected.

Hamish: But getaway?

Osman: Yeah. And there isn't even really sidewalks in there. Like, it's. Yeah, it's hard to find street parking like it's very.

Hamish: It's it almost feels gated.

Osman: It almost. It feels gated. But it's not. You can drive right up Japan. Right.

Hamish: Like that one community that's getting a bunch of publicity. Did you see that? They're going to put gates around the public streets. That's down in Littleton. Beaumont. Oh, I got to tell you.

Osman: I don't know anything about this.

Hamish: Yeah, it's a little like neighborhood. And they're tired of people using it as a through street. So they're getting off public streets and it's getting so much attention. That's next part okay.

Osman: All right. We'll get to that. Yeah. Our next one is 1695 Orchard Avenue. And this transaction just closed two days after the Fourth of July, on July 6th. It's an even larger house, 6700ft², five bedrooms, six baths, with a three car attached garage built in 2015. So it's an 11 year old house and it's in a really nice location. It's on the corner of Orchard and 17th, which is not a particularly easy spot. Right? It's not a it's not a through street in that you see a lot of traffic like 19th or Broadway. It's tucked actually almost equidistant between those busier streets. You're not going to hear Broadway, and you can easily hop on your bike or stroll to all of the Lucky's Empire. Or as one of my favorite clients calls it, the Unlucky Empire because of how expensive everything is. Oh, for the record, I love Lucky's. Make it clear I'm not decent on.

Hamish: The council to you on the spot.

Osman: But Lucky's is pricey. But obviously if you're spending 5.6 million, you don't really care that Lucky's is a little pricey, but you will definitely appreciate their quality and sort of the neighborhood grocery feel, as well as Lucky's Bake Shop and the liquor stores there, and a handful of restaurants that are really nice to have and walking distance which amenities the neighborhood. And then directly on the west side of that, you've got Wonderland like open space. So great location and it's only 11 years old. So not not terribly old. Very large lot for Boulder standards at almost 17,000ft². And for sure home. That's on the top 10 or 12% of home sizes in the city. And 60 700ft² is not that big for, say, Texas, but for Boulder. That's on the large size. And most people would say the four bedrooms on the upper one in the basement, three car garage. These are kind of minimums for a decent family house. And that's really what this is with what I would call a pretty fetching design, a lot of high contrast white on black, which is no longer the look. Okay. And we're going to get to this in one of our later listings, where they have added a lot of gold tone to the to what looks like dated interior photography to give it that more gold. Toni, look, this particular house is a lot of still the grays, whites and blacks. The high contrast that was popular when it was built and likely has not seen much of an update. Nice. Really nice covered patio area with TV and fireplace. Also a nice pool in this house. And you got to ask yourself Hamish Price independent. Would you rather have 1695 orchard or would you rather have 440 japonica.

Hamish: I like the styling of orchard a little bit more. Aside from it looks like a triplex from the street. Does look like a trap, doesn't it? I thought you were showing like you picked some sort of attached dwelling. But the backyard and the pool space to me, I like it a little bit more, doesn't it? It's kind of try plexi.

Osman: It does look like that. Yeah. I, you know, I'm just not in love with the interior high contrast look like it definitely looks like it was built in 2015. But you know, when I look back on the japonica house, it also has those three peaks. Look at the front of the house. It's the angle of that first photo that makes it look like a triplex, but it has the three independent dormer structures. So not a completely different design, but, you know, over 1000ft² larger location.

Hamish: I'd take japonica.

Osman: Exactly. The location of japonica is worth a premium for west of Broadway. But this location is not bad. And it's tucked pretty tight into the neighborhood. And it's it's sold for.

Hamish: Three, five point.

Osman: $3 million less, for a substantively larger house. And even if you spend 50 grand repainting the entire thing and making it look better or more current, you're still so far below the japonica price point. I would say, when it comes to the world of luxury homes or ultra luxury homes in Boulder, this is a value play compared to japonica, and it doesn't come close to arguably the design standards of japonica. And it's also it's also.

Hamish: Not and all that stuff. Right. That japonica has that I'm not sure about.

Osman: I don't think we're it's a net zero house. So there is that for sure. Anyway, I think it's a fantastic deal that these, these buyers nailed. So where did this listing start? Let's talk about the history of it. It listed originally in January at 6.5. And in mid-March they cut the price to just under six. And then two months later it finally went under contract. And it sold for about about 400,000 below the last list price. So a far more tolerable listing experience for the seller. It did sell as a cash deal, but that's not really a particular surprise.

Hamish: So yeah, I'm seeing about 13.8% discount from originalist. Yeah, yeah.

Osman: But so really, if you could buy either of these houses, can you get your head around spending $3 million for japonica. And it's really challenging to get your head around it. Excluding the basement, there are only 400ft² difference and you have a three car garage. Maybe you don't have the premium exclusivity. It's really what you're paying for. Is the exclusivity.

Hamish: A very large part.

Osman: Of it, right? Like it's not about the house and it's not about the proximity to downtown, and it's not about the proximity or walkability to groceries or.

Hamish: Either are great. Yeah.

Osman: Both are fine. It's the it's the deep exclusivity of those three streets. That japonica is a lollipop off of a cul de sac off of it's Iris, juniper and Kalmia. And there's only. Oh, I don't know how many. There's not that many helms. At some point we're going to do just an analysis of these three streets and how they've grown in value. And if you were our client, we would happily do that for you. So you can get a sense of whether you're eight plus million dollars is well protected, and you can get a sense of even though the past isn't the future, you can you can straight line or even discount the future appreciation by 20% or 30%.

Hamish: And see what the $3 million difference gets you in each name. How does.

Osman: That look over the last 20 years and or how well, what's the like? One of the things that affluent buyers should always pay attention to is the distribution of other high end homes in the neighborhood and other high end transactions. And what you're definitely going to see is that these three streets, Iris, juniper and Kalmia are much better supported when you're spending north of 5 million than this spot just west of 19th on Orchard and 17th, you know this spot. Cool spot, but has a lot of mid-market homes compared.

Hamish: To the home. Types are all over the place in that area.

Osman: There, and they're all in this house and orchard doesn't have nearly the privacy, but you would expect it to above five but it doesn't. Okay. Now we're going to slum it down in the Boulder market.

Hamish: And tale of two luxuries.

Osman: Yeah. Right. We're now we're gonna slum it down to 324. Sorry. 325 Norton Street. And now we're in the land of the opposite of discounts. So this particular house was built in the 60s, and this is what I was talking about just east of this neighborhood. Right. Go further down the hill on Dartmouth. And that little pocket of homes off of Dover was part of Martin Acres back in the day. But when you head west and go up the hill all the way up to the end of Dartmouth, or close to the end, you get onto Norton Street, and Norton Street is a cut through to Coler. And this is a really interesting location because it's part of Highland Park. And that means you have this. Well, some of these homes have direct access to a city park that is that has very limited access for the public to get into. And this particular house looks like it might you might be able to shoot out the back and then around your neighbor's yard. But I think those yards back end to end. So I'm not sure you can actually get right into the Highland Park without without crossing some neighbors yards. But anyway, this particular house, 3500ft² advertised, listed at 1.85 60 zero. Construction, two car attached garage, multi-level house. Right.

Hamish: You call this like a raised, two story raised ranch?

Osman: You know, they listed it as a two story. I think this design looks very much like a raised ranch. But yeah.

Hamish: It's kind of like the garage is the lower. Yeah.

Osman: So here's the thing about this particular spot in Boulder, there is a bunch of like, we had a client base on Dartmouth, and the house needed a lot of structural repair. And the reason for that is that the engineering standards in the 50s and 60s were nowhere near what we have to engineer to today. And it's a steep hillside. So all of that pressure of a steep hillside puts pressure on the foundation. And our particular listing needed a lot of repair. And it would not surprise me if this one does, to just on the basis of the topography of the listing photos. It's on a steep hillside.

Hamish: And the expensive clay and all sorts of exciting things that Colorado has to offer.

Osman: But that didn't stop a buyer. It was listed at 1.85 on June 17th and it was under contract. Almost immediately, the listing agent disclosed that all offers were due on Monday, the 22nd highest and best no escalation clauses. And this is the interesting part that should give or should have given buyers pause. It says all materials intended for informational purposes only. Like isn't all all material information okay.

Hamish: Information is for informational.

Osman: It's it's compiled from sources deemed reliable but subject to errors and omissions or with withdrawal without notice. No statement is made as to the accuracy of any description or measurement, including square footage. Specifically, calling out the square footage and then the date of the solar PV system is unknown, right?

Hamish: Yeah, right.

Osman: Exactly. How is that unknown? How do you not know the date you hooked up to Excel? Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And then the total square footage, the finished.

Hamish: Square footage.

Osman: And the square footage with the basement are all listed the same at 3500ft². But then the breakdown is that the main level has 1857. And the lower level, it's not described as a basement is 1643 zero basement square footage and 574 garage square feet. And all of that is coming from the tax assessor, which is totally fine, but it basically would tell you to that the square footage may or may not be remotely accurate. And so you really should get a sense of that. All those people don't really question square footage from most people accept the tax assessor. It's just that it's a little bit odd, particularly the call out about no statement. No statement is made right as to the accuracy of any description or measurement, and then the specifically including square footage. So if we were representing the buyer, we would give them a little bit of a warning that, look, there's a good chance that some of this build out is not permitted. The fact that they don't even know the solar system installation date strongly. So there's a bunch of unpermitted work.

Hamish: I don't even know if you can apply to Excel without a permit.

Osman: I don't think you can. So. So I don't know why they're like, so most most buyers are going to be fine with that. But they need to know that before they write the offer and in the scrum of six days, to.

Hamish: Offer a good.

Osman: Point and a sale price that went 50,000 above list and was cash, and the buyers represented by an agent with Redfin. Right. Which basically means they click the button. This is click a button.

Hamish: This shows, you know, the seller.

Osman: Though I do, and I don't want to go into that. I know the listing agent. I.

Hamish: But yeah.

Osman: Yeah, I sure hope they did. Their due diligence is what I have to say, particularly on the foundation. I mean, I'm less personally concerned about square footage discrepancies as long as we're ballpark. It's a nice big 10,000 square foot lot, right? It's over 10,000. So maybe someday it'll have subdivision potential, although the steepness of that is probably limited. The location is really nice and the house is really nice, right? Five bedrooms, four baths, three on the main, two on the lower level. It's got that sizzle factor of the sauna. Okay. And sizzle factor sells houses.

Hamish: I really like the flagstone stairs up to the front door, things like that. Like the landscaping is nice. Do you think that Redfin agent was just like Holy Commission?

Osman: I don't know the structure. Yeah. Some of.

Hamish: The.

Osman: Good points, I think Redfin, some of them are just employees, some of them are experienced agents. But when you click the button for a showing, you have no idea who's representing you, and maybe you're getting a bit of a discount back or something. It's like, you really, I really hope you're doing your due diligence, particularly in a location that has known structural issues. And there's Disclaimer City when it comes to any broker remarks. And maybe you got a good deal, or maybe you paid 50 grand more or 100 grand more than you should have on this listing. Click click for a showing is probably the worst thing that could have happened in this industry when it comes to professionalism and service, and most listing agents are really wary of the click to show agents because of the complete lack of professionalism when it comes to contract knowledge, negotiation expertise, market valuation knowledge and the buyers can sense that. Sometimes they don't even close. Even though they were the winner in the bidding war. But this one did. And they paid 50 grand more than the list. And I hope it works out.

Hamish: Me too. That's a positive. That's a positive close for that.

Osman: Maybe they're deeply happy with the deal. Okay. 925 925 Yale Road. And this particular one is super interesting because it is a very common size and type of house throughout South Boulder. It's three bedroom, one bath with a basement with a one car attached garage, 9000 square foot lot, a little bigger than typical. And so it qualifies for our South Boulder Ranch Index. Oh no, sorry, it has the basement so it doesn't qualify because of that basement, but it was priced almost as if it didn't have the basement at 825. We're right on the cusp. So my rule of thumb has been roughly 10% for crossing Table Mesa and going in crossing, crossing Broadway and going into the Table Mesa neighborhood. So this same type of house without a basement should have been around 750 in Martin Acres. So add 10%, which is 75 grand. Okay, you're kind of at that point at the list price of 825. But this had a basement, so it looked like it was seriously underpriced. If it was priced as if it didn't have a basement. And when you look at the interior photos, I see original almost everything. Like I think the kitchen may have been updated at some point, but.

Hamish: Real time capsule stuff.

Osman: This stuff looks like a time capsule. Yeah, like the sink is no longer original. These homes were built before dishwashers, so clearly it had some work. But the basement shows signs of wow. I mean, I'm just looking at the black on the flooring. Hamish. On the photos. No, look at the look at the interior photos. The windows are done, but the floors look like they had something that like some sort of flooring that was glued down. There it is. And then ripped up like on one. One of the photos shows all those stripes, right? Yeah. So. And the bathrooms are looking pretty rough. It looks like.

Hamish: Oh okay. Yeah.

Osman: And then when you look at the basement, you see the drop tile and you see that all of the interior finish has been stripped down to the studs. So likely there was a flood and you could see the remnants of the tile marks. You can see what might be mold, certainly floor efflorescence from the water damage the house got. You can see the flood cuts from the water damage. So that so in the bathroom you can see where they've done a flood cut. So this is why the home was priced so low. It was priced for a remodel project. And it was also price for the fact it was it's directly across from the church and some people are fine with that. I would be personally fine with that. But it also means you're going to get a lot of traffic on at least one day of the week, and the rest of the time it's kind of an empty parking lot, which is directly across from your home. But you're in the right school districts and you've got a lot of square footage, and it was priced as a fire sale. And that's what the listing agent almost certainly intended was to get it sold fast, and probably under the direction of their client, but listed at 825 sold for 905. The frenzy over the house was over in five days and honestly, probably faster than that. Remember, the listing agent doesn't have to change the status for three business days, so it could have been over on day two where they got this cash offer and it closed just over two weeks. 15 days on market total cash deal. You can close that fast. Somebody wanted it and they nailed it. They got it for 905.

Hamish: So entry level table table Mesa then is that what this is.

Osman: Oh super.

Hamish: Entry level.

Osman: Yeah. For table Mesa under a million bucks ranch with a basement.

Hamish: A good way to get in.

Osman: This was a deal for somebody willing to do the work. And that person better be experienced because this House could have some hidden, hidden stuff. Right? I bought a house like this and a bidding war paid over list in a bidding war, just like this buyer. And it turned out that the entire plumbing system needed to be ripped out and replaced. But we had budgeted for other things, like the furnace was shot. At least the windows are new on this house, which is nice, but everything else looks like it's going to need to be completely redone. And there may be some environmental things hiding in the walls or in the mastic that all that black glue could be full of asbestos. Like there could be a pretty heavy number to have gone without. I mean, we don't know. He could have done. They could have done full inspection. We don't know what they you know, what the deal points are. But they paid cash and closed in two weeks.

Hamish: They wanted.

Osman: It, they wanted it. And the listing agent intentionally, in my opinion, intentionally prices the low. It's an agent that knows the market.

Hamish: So yeah okay.

Osman: And that's what you do. If you have a house that is that rough or is it a compromise location or both and you need it sold experiences do not price it like it's in a normal location and in good shape. Price it 100,000 below market and get it sold fast in a bidding war.

Hamish: Get the get the froth, get the activity and get it up.

Osman: Our last one is 3825 Telluride. Place and.

Hamish: Place to see some Telluride.

Osman: Oh yeah, because we had a listing there. Yeah. And this is a 1400 square foot townhome with a one car attached garage built in the 70s. I love the Shanahan Ridge neighborhood because it's so illustrates how different development periods, handled land. And you will never see anything built in Boulder again like this, where there is a lot of space, there are neighborhood paths through community owned open space to the public. Open space land was not as precious when in the 70s, and they built a bunch of these townhomes and some of them have their own private patios. Other ones don't. This one is right up against the open space, which I think is association owned open space. And even though the interior didn't have a lot of updates, I mean, they had the one accent wall, the woodstove was replaced with a fireplace, but that's about it. It looks a lot like it did when this person acquired the house. I looked at the old photos. The kitchen is maybe a 90s or early 2000 remodel, but then the gold, the gold toned it on the on the marketing, like all the photos, have a soft gold tone as opposed to this harsh, high contrast look. And so I'm going to give props to the listing agent for making this look.

Hamish: I did think it looked really nice.

Osman: It looks so nice. We're being fooled by the grade because it is really just the 90s kitchen. It's not a new kitchen, but it looks so like it's been redone a few years ago when it hasn't.

Hamish: You gotta see this picture I took of Sofia's new listing coming up the same thing. I was like, why does this look so good? It's like a 70s kitchen, like.

Osman: I don't know, gold tone filter. And by the way, I have those gold tone, the actual gold. Like not. You don't have to do it in the post. You can do it on the camera lens itself, but then you might be shooting it twice with the filter without just in case it doesn't work out. Yeah, it's easier to add the kind of gold tone in post, but it's harder to get that softness that looks like there's a difference in what it looks like in post versus.

Hamish: Totally.

Osman: In camera, but most people maybe wouldn't notice it and wouldn't see this nuance. But in this particular case.

Hamish: Reasonably sharp to these images.

Osman: Look, kudos to the to the to the cellar. They acquired it for 650 in 2020. They're selling it for 800. And what is a relatively soft market for attached dwellings. And they got it under contract within two days which is spectacular. So right away they got it under contract when they listed it at 800 and the buyer did not pay cash, there was a negotiation concession for something 6000 bucks. We don't know exactly what the 6000 bucks was for. So really the net price was 794 or whatever, 793 and change. And you see that they canceled the open house because they got such a strong offer. I, I really wonder the backstory of this buyer. Like, did they feel the need to pay full list and close fast to, to cut off the open house? Sometimes people do that.

Hamish: Oh yeah.

Osman: That's pretty because they're so nervous about losing it. And it might also be the timing of the buyer. They're in town just this week. This is the one. The difference between 750 and 850 is irrelevant, right. Because I think ours was closer to 750.

Hamish: I think.

Osman: So I don't have.

Hamish: When you've got to have it, you gotta have it.

Osman: It's very similar to this one, but ours did not. Back to the open space the way this one I think.

Hamish: Has a basement.

Osman: Two and this one has a basement. Right. So we know these because we had a listing not that long ago.

Hamish: This I think is in the same building.

Osman: And ours did not sell right away. It did not have all the updates, but this one.

Hamish: Did larger.

Osman: Yeah it's larger. And I also admire the gold toning of the photography that makes it look well.

Hamish: The wood grain is gorgeous and.

Osman: It did help to have wood grain which has come back. But I think the right answer from a marketing perspective is this is to add gold tone when there's natural wood colors that we can use to bring out the natural wood in our marketing. So I really it was impressed with how fast this sold. And it sold for a substantially high number. But of course it had some differences with our listing, but I really liked the marketing approach of it. So and if you're looking for Shanahan Ridge back in 2022, 23, there were bidding wars for everything and then the prices come back down. Some of these were like at a million bucks, and they've come back to reality at 800, much more comfortable price point. And people love this location.

Hamish: I think there's great value here.

Osman: It's great. It's great access to the open space. The homes are now 600 bucks a month, a little steep, but hey, you have a detached garage, you have plenty of space. It's lock and leave lifestyle. Yeah. No, I really liked, I don't know about the one bedroom on the upper one on the basement. We had one on the main. We didn't.

Hamish: Have a base. Nice. No, we did not have a basement. Two up, one in the main. Yeah. And, I know a buyer of ours who would have liked it.

Osman: Well, it it would have worked for a bunch of different buyers. But I really like how this one played out. And it's a very good data point for our mental data set of, of deals like this is a good one for those that have been tracking Shanahan.

Hamish: To point to. Yeah, exactly. Well that's sales.

Osman: So one of the things I want to mention that is sales. But I've said this now twice. We've spent a lot of time focusing on the photography of this listing. And one of the things that a lot of listing agents try to do is they work with their seller to prepare a listing for sale, and then there's weeks or months of that process. And finally the house is ready. And instead of giving the marketing team adequate time to get this right, the listing agent wants photography and videography done in two.

Hamish: Days yesterday. Yeah, and.

Osman: Because they don't want to blow the rest of the summer selling season, although I would argue it's already passed the peak they like now, they're like sprinting the finish line. And this is where mistakes are made. And this particular imagery I think was very intentional to capture the current look even though this house has a dated interior. Yeah. So if you're a seller or frankly, a listing agent listening to this, even the agent is on our own team giving us more time to get photography and videography right for feedback, for thinking about how even something as simple as color tone, how important that is in terms of how people perceive this listing, it's really important it don't rush the finish line.

Hamish: It can kind of make up for the loss in time on market. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, especially I mean, you want to bring maybe me at least I'm a little biased because I'm in the media. But I want to bring a complete listing to market, you know, where it's thought out, it's intentional and it's not rush to get there.

Osman: I get the urgency. You've put in so much time to get this listing ready, and now it feels like your work is done. So what's with the photographer? And if.

Hamish: You're they're just.

Osman: Starting and I'll tell you something. If the photographer is available tomorrow and the photos are done the day after, you're probably not getting high quality work. You're getting one of the cheapie, unless it's, you know, in house work, we and I don't encourage this. We can do it. But it isn't like it increases the probability of a mistake or.

Hamish: Missing things.

Osman: Missing something that we could have done better. And if you're and this is a good question, if you're hiring a listing agent, ask them about their photographer and if if they can get their photography done in 24 hours, I will tell you they're probably not dealing with high quality photographers.

Hamish: Or,

Osman: It's a dial. It's a it's like it's a, it's like an Uber. It's the Uber of photography where they're independent contractors and there's a website where people can get their photography book that fast. And it's a random photographer.

Hamish: Yeah, there's the gig, there's that.

Osman: The gig photographer.

Hamish: Yeah. And then I'm like, because I know, Sophie, for example, has that photographer that they really liked and that we had come on for one of the listings that you brought them on. Yeah. And I think too, when you have like a agent and they're like, oh, I've been working with this photographer forever and I really like them. That's that's generally a good sign.

Osman: It's a.

Hamish: Great time. Yeah, exactly.

Osman: Great sign. If they're discerning and it's really about the way the marketing makes buyers feel about the house, it's so important. And sometimes you get these comments from people online, they're like, why are you including these detail shots? Why don't I have a photo of the garage or a photo of the storage space, or the shed in the back, or the bathroom from the 70s? And the answer is really simple that doesn't sell the house. The marketing of the photography and the videography are a key component of the way a buyer is going to feel about that helm, and whether or not they want to schedule a showing. Almost nobody is buying a house without seeing a house in person. It happens once a year. We'll do a deal like that. But it's rare. Yeah, it's super rare.

Hamish: Yeah. There is a picture I'm just going to pull up for you, of a detail shot. I got a Sophie's listing yesterday, and it's genuinely like it's a picture of the staging, but it's going to be nice. It's going to be a nice little addition.

Osman: Detail shots.

Hamish: Exactly.

Osman: Are part of the feel of the story of the home and all of that online marketing, the videography and the photography is designed to do what, encourage people to schedule a showing and also give them a sense of exclusivity. The other marketing material like, oh, you know, like it just hit the market. Like we started the podcast. Yeah. And we're having an open house. There's a lot of interest. If you want this one, you really need to go strong and go above list. That's a great shot. Yeah. It tells the story.

Hamish: Now it's on the screen because the listing will be live by the time this plugin. Excellent. Yeah. Excellent.

Osman: All right. I think it's time for carve out teams because we have less than ten minutes to wrap.

Hamish: Are we straight to Carve Outs? We've got a promo. We've got our favorite class.

Osman: Oh, my.

Hamish: Favorite quote.

Osman: All right, I'll mention this.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: I'm on the hunt for an investment property. Residential, preferably South Boulder, preferably large lot. And if you currently have an income producing property that you're thinking about selling for whatever reason, and often it's tax driven if you have it already rented. In particular, I'm very interested in having a conversation with you. So our favorite client is me. I'm talking about buying it from my own investment portfolio, and I want to make sure I put out the word that in addition to serving our buyers and sellers, we also have an investment portfolio that I would love to grow. And I don't compete with my clients. So if you're one of our clients, hearing this or thinking about becoming a client, just keep in mind that if a new listing pops up and I'm interested in it and you're interested in it, I'm going to ask you, how are you seriously interested in it? Because if the answer is yes, I'm not even going to look at it out. I'm out until you tell me that you're that you're not interested in it. And typically our clients are not looking for the same thing I'm looking for. Most of our clients are not looking for income producing assets. They're not investing.

Hamish: Every now and then there's the strange overlap. But even then you're out.

Osman: It happened recently, and I had to ask. I need an answer from you in two days, whether you want this house or not. If you don't, I might want it. But I'm not even going to look at it until I get an answer from you, because I don't want to invest my time. And I'm looking at it for you, which is a whole different mindset. Like it's a different.

Hamish: Genuinely is.

Osman: And what's funny is that particular house, the client asked me point blank, why are you not interested in this house? And I looked at it and I'm like, I didn't even think about it because it didn't even occur to me that this would fit my investment criteria. I'm focusing on serving you. It's like a totally different game. So she's no longer interested in it. And I might be offering on that house. We'll see. But I have motivation to go find an investment property. So if you're listening to this or watching it and you have something in your pocket that's a good investment property, preferably in South Boulder.

Hamish: I think they're mostly detached at this rate.

Osman: Oh, I'll detach. I'm not interested in condos or townhomes on the hose are not really working out well for me when it comes to managing properties. So let me know what you got and maybe we can work out a deal. Although I'm not exclusively anti condo, I'll also mention that particularly gold run. There are certain layouts.

Hamish: That's.

Osman: In Gold Run that I think are fantastic. And prices have come down far enough at Gold Run that it might be time to look at Gold Run again.

Hamish: I think I still have the garage code for gold run in one of the buildings. Excellent. Yeah, and the health.

Osman: Club.

Hamish: There, so that'll be easy. Well, he's on our agency. Other agents, so stay away. All righty. Carve outs and I will be quick. Should I go first or do you first? Okay. Fourth of July happened, and I had a very good one. I'm seeing someone, and we're gonna leave it at that.

Osman: But Hamish is off the market.

Hamish: For now. No. Listen, I know.

Osman: She.

Hamish: Sounded really bad.

Osman: I was temporary.

Hamish: I tried to be witty. Anyway, we had a fantastic fourth. Trying to think if there's anything too crazy. The fun thing was setting up that, like, photo booth. Basically, I just set up the camera on a tripod, and I have, like, the little remote shutter button. So I went and put it where I wanted the people to stand, and couples could come up and just grab it and put themselves in front of the camera and take a picture, you know, autofocus, all the things. I put it on a long focal length to get a nice little bokeh going and just set it up.

Osman: Which camera were using?

Hamish: Using my guy. Nice little seven. Yeah. But it was what.

Osman: What lens were you using the 50.

Hamish: Oh, no, I was using, it was a 35 to 7, 35 to 100, I believe. So the full the full frame equivalent was 70 to 200. So real, real good and f 2.8. But, Yeah, that was that was fun. Just nobody used it. So I set it up and I was like, encouraging people to come by, showing them how to work, how it would work and everything. And after that, nobody went to it. I was like, dang it.

Osman: But it'll people want the photographer there.

Hamish: They do. Yeah.

Osman: And honestly, it just feels more personal. Plus, I can't believe you would leave an expensive camera on a tripod at a party.

Hamish: It was a little trusting. Also, I knew everybody really well, so there was that.

Osman: Easily so I could trip on it.

Hamish: Yeah that's fair. It was outside to the front.

Osman: Lawn I have had. I still have camera trauma from losing a Sony action cam that I had out there on, time lapse, and the wind picked up the tripod and slammed it into the rocks. And I was like, that was the end of that camera.

Hamish: Yeah, that's that's serious tripods you can't trust too much. Like, I'm glad we're within running distance of these guys. But that was pretty much it. I did have them. I was like kind of cracking jokes because I know them pretty well, so it's easy to make them laugh. And then everybody was coupled. So I was like, okay, I need a kiss cam. And some of them were really good, like some genuinely photogenic kisses and then others where it's like you could see like chemistry in some of the photos to kind of neat. But I was definitely like, I need to learn better because we're doing a bit of headshot work and everything to and, I was like, you know, extracurricular for me, but that's my carve out. Thanks for joining Houseman.

Osman: Well, I went to Ed Sheeran for the fourth and it was fantastic. Over three hours, virtually every song I wanted to hear, he played and performed so well. And I've never been to a stadium show. This was at Mile High or and Empower Field. Yeah, which is just not roll off the tongue like Mile High.

Hamish: I love Mile High.

Osman: Got to say hi and what a fun night. And he played oh my God, American Pie by Don McLean. He did a cover of that which was amazing.

Hamish: He would probably kill that.

Osman: Yeah. And the and the visuals were as simple but not simple. And I thought was were really well, everything was really well done. And the audience was just a big love in of all these warm, emotional, fuzzy songs. But what was not visible in my social media posts, which are Instagram Stories. So they're.

Hamish: Going, yeah.

Osman: I post that sort of stuff on stories. It disappears in 24 hours. I'm cool that, what's not visible as I was in an ankle boot or a foot boot and had a crutch because I've had a flare up of Achilles insertion and I'm learning a lot this second flare up now, two years later of this issue, it's first of all, it really helps you understand how hard it is for people to get around with mobility issues and sometimes how invisible their struggle can be, particularly in a big crowd like, yeah, you know, it's not that anybody needs to necessarily give people, you know, sympathy. In fact, some people, I think, resent the sympathy if you're given sympathy. Yeah. But at the same time, it helps you understand how the world is not set up for people with mobility issues through and through. And the struggle to the car was real. The struggle back from the stadium to where the Uber picked up was so horrendously bad and painful. It was the worst part of the experience. And as in the real estate world, we don't often think about the struggles that people have getting in and out of buildings, going up and down steps and mobility issues happen to everybody at some well, most people at some point in their life. So I think it's always smart to think about how this house might function in the event you no longer have easy mobility, whether you're on crutches or in a wheelchair or something worse happens to you or a loved one. And it's something that just put. We often put that in the back of a of the heads of our clients when we're looking at homes like, are you comfortable with all the stairs in this house? Yeah, especially if they're a little older, because it's more than likely they're going to have mobility issues in the future or have a parent living with them with mobility issues.

Osman: It's part of the thing that agents can do is help broaden people's perspectives when they're buying houses. But I had a fantastic fourth and the tenant opposite these getting better. And I'm probably going to go see an acupuncturist. But I also have learned. How widespread peptides are becoming.

Hamish: They're the new buzzword.

Osman: Peptides are everywhere, everywhere. And holy cow, there are all these companies that are selling peptides that they're labeled as experimental use.

Hamish: Research chemicals.

Osman: Oh, my.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: It's it is. I feel like this is it's sort of like when certain drugs hit the market in the 70s and 80s 70s 80s before they were regulated, including things like mushrooms and acid and.

Hamish: MDMA.

Osman: Ecstasy, MDMA, DMT and all of these things that were not unlawful. They were two they were shut. They were ahead of the law. And I feel like peptides, the legal form that are FDA approved, are more easily available. But the unregulated world of peptides is insane. It's insane how much is out there and I'm looking into it. But man, I got to fix this ankle.

Hamish: Be careful man.

Osman: Yeah, I know I it's a little concerning how much is out there.

Hamish: It's it's so like in presentations similar to, like, the sphere and like some of the larger kind of like crypto almost. So just off that, I'm like, kind of keeping my distance. But I mean, people are using it in a form of research. So we'll get results. We'll see. You know.

Osman: My social media feed advertising is all tendons, plantar fasciitis and peptides and all these different things. You could by constantly hitting me with these ads, it's insane.

Hamish: Oh man. I'll find there's a video somewhere. Another that I was watching that was about peptides. I didn't really like it, but it kind of got into like the research chemicals and how they're able to sell it and stuff like that. So anyways, I am selling peptides. If you are interested in.

Osman: We do not sell peptides or endorse them. No interest to mention that I've seen a lot of ads and I think that's a good stopping point for this pod. Hamish we have had a pretty short one for our normal length of pod.

Hamish: So we're right on time if we go. Yeah.

Osman: Well. Thank you so much for spending your time. With the House Einstein podcast team. We deeply appreciate you as listeners and viewers and those of you that have reached out, we do get your emails and all of I read all of them. If I haven't responded, I apologize. Sometimes we're just super busy. And if you are interested in becoming a client of the House Einstein Brokerage, or if you're interested in becoming a broker at House Einstein, I'll lead you to the same place we are now, starting to see people approaching us to potentially join our brokerage. From the podcast and other content that we produce. We welcome those inquiries and you can find us at houseeinstein.com. We represent buyers and sellers from Fort Collins to the Denver suburbs. We're also in the mountain foothills. The company's mission is to help you make a smarter real estate decision. And the mission of this podcast was to entertain you. Hopefully you have been entertained, and if you haven't, please don't let me know. I really don't want to hear it all.

Hamish: Direct it to me, but I won't tell you still.

Osman: All right, you can tell me.

Hamish: That's fine.

Osman: All right, everybody, we'll see you next time.