Buying a Condo in Denver? What to Check Before You Write the Offer.

Loan guidelines described here are current as of August 2026 and change periodically. Ask your loan officer what applies to your file.

Most Denver-area condo purchases close on ordinary financing without incident. That's worth saying up front, because what follows is a list of things that can go wrong, and it would be easy to finish this article thinking condos are landmines. They aren't.

But condos carry one layer of homework that houses don't, and when it goes wrong it goes wrong late — three weeks before closing, after the inspection, after you've paid for an appraisal. Almost all of it is checkable earlier. Here's how.

Start here: is it actually a condo?

This question changes everything else in this article, and a surprising number of buyers don't know the answer about the place they're touring.

A condominium means you own the interior of your unit and share ownership of the building and grounds with everyone else. Condos get a project review — the lender evaluates the building and the HOA, not just you.

A townhome or row home platted as a PUD means you own your unit and the land under it, in fee simple. There's still an HOA, still dues, still shared amenities. But for most conventional loans, PUD projects get a review waiver. No HOA questionnaire hunt, no warrantability question, none of the five problems below.

Here's the catch: they look identical from the street. Denver metro is full of attached townhome-style homes, and some are condos and some are PUDs. Central Park, Green Valley Ranch, Arvada, Lakewood — you'll find both.

How to find out in two minutes: ask your agent to check the property subtype in the MLS, or look at the title commitment or the recorded plat. A condominium map and a subdivision plat are different documents. Your loan officer can also tell you from the address.

If it's a PUD, most of what follows doesn't apply to you and you can relax. If it's a condo, keep reading.

The part nobody warns you about: the building has to qualify too

When you buy a house, the lender evaluates you — income, credit, assets — plus an appraisal.

When you buy a condo, there's a second evaluation of the project: the building, the HOA, its budget, its insurance, and whether anyone is suing anyone.

The reason is that most conventional mortgages get sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac after closing, and they have rules about what they'll buy. A condo project meeting those rules is warrantable. One that doesn't is non-warrantable.

Non-warrantable doesn't mean you can't buy the place. It means conventional financing is off the table and you're looking at more specialized options, which take longer to arrange. That's a very different conversation in week one than in week three with a closing date on the calendar.

One more thing worth knowing: warrantability is decided per loan and per lender, not stamped on a building permanently. One decline doesn't always mean the building is dead — and a building that's fine today can go non-warrantable later if litigation gets filed or an insurance renewal drops coverage below standard. That affects your ability to refinance and the pool of buyers you can sell to down the road.

Your contract does more of this work than you think

This is the part most condo guides skip, and it's the most useful thing in this article.

Once you're under contract on a Colorado property with an HOA, the standard Contract to Buy and Sell gives you real protection:

The seller delivers the Association Documents at the seller's expense, by the Association Documents Deadline (§7.2). Not at your expense, and not as a favor.

The list is broad (§7.3) — declarations, articles, bylaws, rules, meeting minutes, a list of all Association insurance policies, assessment lists, budgets, financial statements, audit results, and written notice of any construction defect claims. That's considerably more than most buyers ask for.

You can terminate based on any unsatisfactory provision in those documents, in your sole subjective discretion (§7.4), with your earnest money returned. That is the broadest exit in the contract. You don't have to justify it.

If the documents arrive late, your clock extends — generally ten days after you receive them, or until closing, whichever comes first. If you don't terminate in time, you've accepted them.

There are separate loan deadlines (§5.2.1 and §5.2.2) covering whether the loan terms work for you and whether the lender's underwriting comes back satisfactory. Read §5.2.2 carefully with your agent: if you don't deliver written notice to terminate on time and the seller isn't in default, your earnest money becomes nonrefundable.

That last point is the real financial risk in a condo purchase. If project review comes back non-warrantable after your loan deadline has passed, you're in default and your earnest money is on the line. This is why timing matters — not because deals fall apart, but because of who pays when they do.

The practical takeaway: these deadlines are blanks on a form. They get pre-filled with day counts sized for a single-family house. On a condo, ask your agent to lengthen the Association Documents and loan deadlines before you sign. It's free, and it's the single most protective thing you can do.

Before you write the offer: what you can realistically learn

Be prepared for a wall here. Colorado gives you no right to HOA documents before you're under contract — the seller's obligation is contractual, and management companies generally won't release a package to someone who isn't an owner or under contract. The documents also cost money, often a few hundred dollars, and the seller has no reason to spend it on a stranger.

So the honest answer to "can I see the budget before I offer" is often "not until we're under contract." Here's what you can usually get anyway:

1. Ask what the seller already has. Many owners have the budget, recent minutes, and last year's insurance summary sitting in a drawer or an owner portal. Costs nothing to ask.

2. Ask what's closed in the building recently, and how it was financed. Your own agent can pull this from the MLS in a few minutes — a more neutral source than the listing agent. Look back twelve to twenty-four months; small buildings may have no sales in six. Several conventional closings is a useful sign, though not a guarantee, since anything that closed before August 2026 was reviewed under a lighter standard than applies now. If everything sold to cash buyers, ask the listing agent why, and treat "I don't know" as an answer in itself.

3. Ask who manages the building and how fast they return lender questionnaires. This is the single best predictor of whether your closing date is realistic. The most common reason condo deals stall isn't a bad answer on the form — it's a management company taking three weeks to send the form back at all.

4. Ask about litigation, in writing, and ask broadly. Lenders want to know about pending and threatened claims, not just filed lawsuits. Ask in those terms, and get the answer from the HOA or its manager rather than relying on a verbal "no" from a seller who may genuinely not know.

5. Ask about special assessments the board has discussed — not just ones already levied. A vote that hasn't happened yet still hits your budget. This lives in the meeting minutes, which is one more reason to get those early.

6. Send whatever you get to your loan officer. Someone who reads these documents regularly can often flag a problem early that would otherwise surface in week three.

7. Build the timeline in. Under the current review requirements, the HOA has more paperwork to produce than it used to. Talk to your loan officer about realistic contract dates before you sign, not after.

Five things that stop condo loans

None of these are about your finances.

1. Underfunded reserves. An association that keeps monthly dues low is sometimes doing it by underfunding the reserve account. Lenders read that as a large special assessment waiting to happen — one a brand-new owner may not be able to absorb. This is one of the most common problems we see.

2. Delinquent owners. If more than 15% of the units in a project are 60 or more days past due on assessments, the project is ineligible — not concerning, ineligible. A similar test applies to each special assessment.

3. Litigation. If the HOA or the developer is named in pending litigation relating to the safety, structural soundness, habitability, or functional use of the project, the project is ineligible for conventional financing. That's categorical, not a judgment call. Some minor matters are carved out — non-monetary disputes, collection actions against delinquent owners, a covered claim the insurer has agreed to defend — but the carve-outs all depend on the matter having no bearing on safety, soundness, habitability or use. An insurance carrier agreeing to defend does not rescue a structural-defect suit.

This matters more in Colorado than in most states. Construction-defect litigation on attached housing is well documented here and it reshaped what got built — Denver-metro condos went from roughly a third of multifamily starts in the mid-2000s to a small fraction in the years after. Colorado law in this area has changed recently, so the landscape isn't static, but the existing housing stock is what it is.

4. Insurance problems. Coverage amounts, deductibles, and whether the master policy meets loan requirements. HOA insurance costs have climbed hard in Colorado, and some associations responded by taking coverage that no longer satisfies lenders. One consequence lands directly on you: where the master policy carries a per-unit deductible, you'll generally need your own unit-owner policy with coverage at least matching that deductible. That's real money at closing that buyers rarely budget for.

5. Deferred maintenance. Known structural problems the association hasn't addressed. This shows up in meeting minutes and in a reserve study's condition assessment — another reason to read the minutes rather than skim the budget.

All of this surfaces through the HOA questionnaire, a form your lender sends to the association or its management company. It's routine. It's also where condo deals most often stall.

Why this got stricter in 2026

Short version, because it affects your timeline.

There used to be an abbreviated review for many condo loans — fewer documents, faster answer. For applications dated August 3, 2026 or later, that shortcut is retired for established projects. Freddie Mac dropped its equivalent the same day.

Small projects got something in return: the review waiver expanded to cover projects of ten or fewer units. But a waiver isn't "no review" — the project still has to meet insurance requirements, can't be flagged unavailable, can't have unaddressed critical repairs, can't be a condo-hotel or timeshare, and for five-to-ten-unit buildings can't be part of a master association or larger development.

Two other changes worth knowing: since July 1, 2026 a master policy's per-unit deductible is capped, and starting January 4, 2027 the reserve allocation lenders look for rises. Read that second one carefully — it's a standard for whether a building is financeable, not a legal requirement on the association. Nobody can make an HOA comply. An association that declines simply becomes harder to buy in.

What it means for you: more paperwork from the HOA, and HOAs move at their own pace. Build extra time into your dates.

FHA and conventional aren't interchangeable here

FHA runs a separate condo approval process. The owner-occupancy minimum is generally 50% for an existing project, lower for projects still under construction, and lower still for existing projects meeting certain financial conditions.

A building can be fine for a conventional loan and fail FHA approval, or the reverse. So "which loan should I use" is partly a question about the building, not just about you.

Free thirty-second check: HUD publishes a searchable list of FHA-approved condo projects. Look up the address before you go further.

If the building doesn't qualify

Not the end. Your options generally look like:

• A different loan type. A project that fails one rule set sometimes passes another. An FHA-approved building may work even if conventional review doesn't, and vice versa.
• A non-agency program. Some lenders finance projects that don't meet agency guidelines. Availability, pricing and requirements differ materially from a standard loan, and not every project or borrower qualifies — ask what's actually available for the specific building before counting on it.
• More money down. This won't fix a project that fails agency review; eligibility is judged on the building, not your loan-to-value. But non-agency programs generally do expect more down, so it matters if you go that route.
• Waiting. If the issue is a reserve study about to be updated or litigation about to resolve, sometimes the building qualifies in a few months.
• Walking away. Sometimes the right answer. A building other buyers also can't finance conventionally may be harder to sell later — worth weighing before you commit.

The point is that finding out early gives you choices. Finding out late gives you one.

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This article is general information about mortgage lending guidelines. It is not legal, insurance, or tax advice, and it is not a commitment to lend or an offer to extend credit. Guidelines change and are applied to each file individually. For questions about an HOA's governing documents, its insurance coverage, its litigation, or your purchase contract, consult a licensed Colorado attorney, insurance professional, or your real estate broker.

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