Sell My House Fast in Colorado: We Buy Houses for Cash, As-Is, Any Condition

Before Any State Clock Starts: the Federal 120-Day Rule

Every state timeline on this page sits behind a federal one, and it is the single most useful thing to know if you have missed payments. Under Regulation X, 12 CFR 1024.41(f)(1), a mortgage servicer generally “shall not make the first notice or filing” required for a judicial or non-judicial foreclosure unless the borrower's mortgage loan obligation is more than 120 days delinquent.

That is roughly four months of missed payments before the state process is even allowed to begin. It is why a state sequence that looks alarmingly short on paper is usually longer in practice than the statute alone suggests.

The exceptions, because they are real. The rule does not apply where the foreclosure is based on a violation of a due-on-sale clause, or where the servicer is joining the action of a superior or subordinate lienholder. Small servicers are not exempt from this particular prohibition. Loan types and servicing arrangements vary, and some loans are outside Regulation X altogether.

So treat 120 days as the general floor rather than a guarantee, and work from the dates on your own paperwork. If a notice has arrived and you do not believe you are past that point, that is a question worth putting to a HUD-approved housing counselor or an attorney before you do anything else.

Colorado Does Not Give You A Redemption Period. It Gives You A Cure, And It Has Two Deadlines

This is the most important correction on the page, because the internet gets it backwards.

You will read that Colorado has a foreclosure redemption period. It does, and it is not yours. C.R.S. 38-38-302 is titled Redemption by Lienor, it gives the right to holders of junior liens, and they have to file notice of intent to redeem within eight business days after the sale. There is no equivalent provision for the former owner. Once a Colorado sale happens, the homeowner's window has closed.

What Colorado gives you instead is the right to cure under C.R.S. 38-38-104, and it runs on two separate deadlines that both fall before the auction.

Deadline one, fifteen calendar days before the sale. You are entitled to cure only if you “file with the officer, no later than fifteen calendar days prior to the date of sale, a written notice of intent to cure together with evidence of the person's right to cure”. Nobody files it for you.

Deadline two, noon the day before.

“No later than 12 noon on the day before the sale, the person desiring to cure the default shall pay to the officer all sums that are due and owing under the evidence of debt and deed of trust or other lien being foreclosed and all fees and costs”

If you have inherited the house, read this next part. The people entitled to cure include the owner, and where the owner is dead or incapacitated, the owner's “heirs, personal representative, legal guardian, or conservator”, expressly “whether or not such person's interest is shown in the records”. So you do not have to wait for probate to put your name on the deed before you can act. That is the single most useful sentence in the Colorado statute for the people who read this page, and almost nobody knows it is there.

The federal rule above generally sits in front of all of this, so the runway before any of these deadlines is usually longer than a homeowner in default assumes. Free HUD-approved housing counseling is available before you commit to anything, including to us.

Official sources: C.R.S. §38-38-104 and §38-38-302

Everything Goes Through The Public Trustee, And We Will Not Guess At The Calendar

Colorado runs foreclosures through a public trustee, an office that exists in every county. It is not a courtroom hearing your case and it is not a private trustee chosen by your lender.

Practically, that means there is an office to deal with. The notice of intent to cure is filed with it. The cure money is paid to it. The statutory cure-statement form in 38-38-104 is addressed to the “Public Trustee (or Sheriff) of the County (or City and County) of”. If you are trying to find out where you stand, that office, in the county where the property sits, is the place to start.

One useful protection sits in the same section. If the holder of your debt fails to file its cure statement when it is due, “the officer shall continue the sale for one week”, and for a further week for each week they keep failing. So a lender that drags its feet on telling you what you owe moves the sale date rather than running out your clock.

What we are deliberately not telling you. We are not going to print a Colorado foreclosure timeline. The sections that set out the notice of election and demand, the combined notice, the publication schedule and how long the public trustee may continue a sale are sections we have not read, and a plausible-sounding number of weeks would be worse than nothing when you are working to a real date. The two deadlines in the card above come from a section we did read. For everything else, call the public trustee's office in your county and ask for the dates on your own file.

We are also making no claim about whether your lender can pursue you for a shortfall after a Colorado sale, or about how a surplus is handled here, because those turn on sections we have not read. What holds generally, and people assume the opposite, is that a surplus is not simply yours to collect: junior liens, second mortgages and the costs of the sale are ordinarily paid ahead of the former owner.

Official source: C.R.S. §38-38-104

About Fifty-Five Dollars, Because Of A Constitutional Amendment

In many states, the line where the deed gets recorded costs real money. In Washington it can run to several percent of the price. In Colorado it is one cent per hundred dollars.

C.R.S. 39-13-102 imposes a documentary fee on “every person offering for recording” a deed conveying Colorado real property, computed “at the rate of one cent for each one hundred dollars, or major fraction thereof” of the consideration. Where the consideration is five hundred dollars or less, no fee is payable at all. It is collected by the county clerk and recorder.

That is 0.01%. On the Colorado median sale price of $552,599 it comes to roughly $55. Not fifty-five hundred. Fifty-five.

Note what the statute does and does not say. It puts the fee on whoever offers the deed for recording, which is a recording duty rather than a rule about buyers and sellers, and a contract can allocate who bears the cost. We are not going to tell you the seller pays it, because the section does not say that.

And there is no transfer tax behind it. The Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, at Article X, Section 20(8)(a) of the Colorado Constitution, says in full: “New or increased transfer tax rates on real property are prohibited.” Read precisely, that is a freeze on new or higher rates rather than a statement that none has ever existed, but the practical effect is that Colorado has no state real estate transfer tax and no prospect of one appearing on your closing statement.

What this page does not tell you. We have not summarized Colorado's seller disclosure obligations or their exemptions, because we have not read them closely enough to state them and an approximation would be worse than nothing. What holds generally is that selling as-is describes who pays for repairs, not what you are allowed to leave unsaid.

Official sources: C.R.S. §39-13-102 and Colo. Const. art. X, §20(8)(a)