Boulder Valley Schools – Tailoring your RE searches

It just isn’t that easy to tell which Boulder Valley schools you can enroll your kids in, when standing outside a particular address. I would not be the first Realtor to trust the Seller/MLS listing information… Only to find the Seller trusted the Realtor that sold them the house 5 years ago, and so on.

In fact just last week I alerted my buyer to a new listing that matched her criteria. Among other things, she was looking for a property that was zoned for Bear Creek Elementary school.  With one child already well established there, one who had just started and a third who she intended to follow the others to Bear Creek, it was vital that we kept the search to homes within Bear Creek Elementary limits.

The listing, on Wildwood Lane, did say that Bear Creek was the designated school, but I decided to check anyway since this was so important.  Oops… looks like the listing agent goofed when entering the data into the MLS. Wildwood Lane is right on the border and some addresses on the lane are zoned for Bear Creek Elementary school, while others are Mesa Elementary.  Mesa Elementary is also a great school FYI and one might also be tempted to say “use the open enrollment program” if you want to remain at Bear Creek.  In theory that is a possibility, but in practice, popular schools like Bear Creek Elementary have no available space which they could fill with those on the open enrollment waiting list.  Not only that, but I have heard if your child has been attending the school for less than a year when you relocate to an address outside of the zoned area, you are not automatically entitled to keep him/her in attendance. This is the case with my buyer.  That middle child would have to be re-enrolled in a different school and if she chose to keep child #1 at Bear Creek, she would now have elementary age kids at two different Boulder Valley schools. Do-able, but definitely not ideal.

I know what you are thinking…

If you don’t actually have kids of that school age, Boulder Valley schools probably aren’t among your biggest concerns… For the Buyer who does, it might well be though.  As a Seller, you need to take note, as a Buyer, you must also realize that you will one day be a Seller.  Boulder Valley schools, their location and their performance, affect resale value too.

One of my Buyers alerted me to this website:

Tick the boxes above the map to show you High, Middle or Primary School (or all), then click on the map, at the location/address in question.

Using it, we were able to tailor a search area to exactly match the school zone my Buyer is interested in. (It’s also possible to use the MLS and search via school name, but as you read above, this method is entirely dependent on the listing agent entering the schools in correctly.) Now when that Buyer flies in from France to shop for a new home, their time is not going to be wasted with listings that simply aren’t going to work.

Oh.. and in case you missed another recent school blog post, there is a great site for ranking schools too.

Check out http://coloradoschoolgrades.com/

We are hear to meet your needs, not waste your time. You deserve that… And more!