Trading Up in Mountain Park Ranch

You have outgrown where you are. Another child, a job that is now permanently at the kitchen table, or the slow realization that the starter home was always a starter home.

The unusual thing about trading up in Mountain Park Ranch is that the step up may already be inside the same master community. The housing here runs from Mountain Canyon Condominiums and The Townes at one end through to The Estates at the Ranch at the other, which means a genuine change in the kind of home you live in without changing much about the life around it.

Two things follow from that. Your dues and your rules change when your parcel changes, because each of the nine sub-associations has its own. And the comparables for both transactions have to come from the right parcel rather than the community at large.

What you get from me is those two transactions run as one plan, with your equity and financing looked at properly before anything is listed, so the sequencing decision is made with numbers rather than a rule of thumb somebody repeated at a barbecue.

Run separately, a sale and a purchase fight each other. Run together, every date is chosen deliberately. The selling half is at the six-step listing process and the buying half at how I help you buy.

• Numbers first. I map your equity, your carrying capacity and what your current home is realistically worth, priced from your own parcel rather than the community. You talk to a lender about what you can hold and for how long.
• The sequencing call. Selling first gives you certainty and a stronger offer, and risks a gap with money and nowhere to live. Buying first removes that and risks carrying two properties. I lay both out against your position. You choose.
• Prepare the sale properly. The walkthrough, the trades, the staging consultation and the photography all happen before you are under time pressure. That step is here, and it protects your next down payment.
• Budget the new dues honestly. Moving parcels within Mountain Park Ranch changes what you pay every month and what you are permitted to do. I get the target sub-association's current figures before you write, not after.
• Write the purchase with the right structure. Contingent offer, rent-back, extended close: which is credible depends on the specific seller, and I will tell you honestly how yours is likely to be received.
• Both closings, one coordinator. My transaction coordinator tracks both sets of dates so nothing depends on you remembering an appraisal deadline during a move.