Buying a House in Colorado From Texas: The 12-Day Rule

Two Texans are reading this: the Texas constitution binds one of you and is silent for the other. If you are selling the Texas house and bringing the proceeds, most of the Texas law below is inert for you. If you are borrowing against that house to fund the purchase here, the Texas constitution set your ceiling and your calendar before any Colorado lender opened a file. The calendar is the harder half: a 12-day floor on the loan's closing, and no Colorado deadline you write can reach it.

Texas takes nothing from you when you leave: no state income tax, no withholding at the closing table, no basis to transfer or forfeit. That is the pleasant part. It's also the trap, because nothing at your Texas closing makes you stop and check which of your instruments still work on this side of the line.

True North Boulder is a real-estate team with eXp Realty. There is a reason this page keeps handing you back across the state line: half of what decides your purchase is Texas law, and none of it is ours to read. Your Texas house, your Texas loan and your return belong to a Texas lender or attorney and to your CPA, and where this page reaches that line you will see us say so rather than guess.

First: are you selling the Texas house, or borrowing against it?

That answer decides whether the next section is yours or somebody else's.

Take no lien against the Texas house, and Section 50(a)(6) of the Texas constitution never touches this purchase. Your constraints are all on this side: the offer you write, the deposit you put up, and deadlines that expire whether or not anyone reminds you. One caveat before you skip the next section: if you might borrow against that house in the meantime, even briefly, the next section is yours after all. A bridge loan secured on a Texas homestead is borrowing, whatever you intend about selling.

Borrow against the Texas house, and read every word of the next one. Which of the two you are decides whether the next section binds you at all, which is why this sits behind a fork rather than being handed to everyone.

Either way, one thing is worth doing today, and it's free. Texas is a non-disclosure state, so you've never been able to look up what a neighbor actually paid. Here the county assessor publishes the sale price and the date for a parcel, searchable by address, readable from your kitchen table in Houston. You'll mostly use Boulder and Larimer, though a Longmont or Berthoud address can sit in Weld, so check which county the parcel is physically in. The honest half of that: your own purchase price becomes public the same way.

If you are borrowing, the Texas constitution sets your ceiling

Article XVI, Section 50(a)(6) of the Texas Constitution governs borrowing against a Texas homestead. It sits in the constitution rather than in lending policy, which is why nobody you talk to can move it.

The ceiling is 80%. The loan must not, when added to "the outstanding principal balances of all other indebtedness secured by valid encumbrances of record against the homestead," exceed "80 percent of the fair market value." Every lien counts, not just the new one. That is tighter than a Colorado lender's own guidelines would allow on the same house, so the number in your head is probably larger than the number available to you.

The 12 days break calendars, and of the three clocks in this rule, it is the only one the text gives no way around. Closing may happen no earlier than "the 12th day after the later of" the date you submit the application or the date the lender delivers the required constitutional notice. That's a floor on closing, not a cooling-off period after signing, and no lender can shorten it.

There is a shorter clock that gets mistaken for it: a one-business-day wait after you receive the final itemized disclosure. That one does bend, on your written consent, for a genuine emergency or other good cause. The 12-day floor does not.

The floor is keyed to your Texas lender's own events rather than to anything in your Colorado contract, so on the day you go under contract here it may already be running, or may not have started at all.

Which means it breaks a Colorado calendar for the reader whose clock starts late. The obvious case is the one who applies after going under contract. That reader is not unusual. A relocating buyer often doesn't discover they need bridge money until they've found the house, and by then twelve days plus underwriting sits inside the closing window they just agreed to. Apply before you shop, and the twelve days can be behind you by the time you write an offer, but only if your Texas lender's notice has gone out too. The floor runs from the later of the two, so ask your Texas lender which date starts your clock, and ask before you tour, not before your Colorado dates are written.

One home-equity loan per 12 months, with narrow exceptions. The bar runs to "the first anniversary of the closing date of any other extension of credit described by Subsection (a)(6)." The bar is keyed to a prior home equity loan under Subsection (a)(6), and the text carries exceptions. Whether a prior loan of yours falls inside (a)(6), and whether an exception reaches you, is a question for your Texas lender.

None of this bends at the lender's discretion, and the penalty is why. A lender that gets it wrong and fails to cure within 60 days of your notice "shall forfeit all principal and interest." The text does give lenders cure paths, but nobody wants to need one, so these terms arrive as facts rather than as an opening position.

And this is where our own guide needs a Texas footnote. Our comparison of a HELOC, a cash-out refinance and a bridge loan doesn't rank them. It says you pick the instrument by which fatal flaw you can live with, and it adds that for an owner planning months ahead and still in the home, a HELOC is usually cheapest. That last line is the one that doesn't survive the state line. On a Texas homestead an open-end account is permitted only as a home equity line of credit, which puts it inside this same regime. Same 80%, same 12 days, same annual bar, plus a minimum of $4,000 on any single advance, which is the opposite of drawing what you need. Fees are separately capped at two percent of principal, excluding appraisal, survey and certain title charges.

Read the constraint precisely, though, because it is narrower than it sounds. The constitution does not stop you funding a Colorado purchase. It stops you funding it from the Texas homestead. What pulls a loan like this into Section 50(a)(6) is the lien it takes on the homestead, so the instruments that don't take one aren't in that regime to begin with: a pledged-asset or securities-backed line against a taxable brokerage account, a 401(k) loan, or buying with other funds and then doing a cash-out refinance against the Colorado property afterward under the delayed-financing exception. These exist; we are not recommending one. Each carries its own risk. Which of them fits you, if any, and whether the one you are offered takes any lien on the Texas homestead, belong with your lender and your financial adviser. That wider menu is worked through at the end of that same guide.

One question sits in front of all of it. Whether a bridge loan secured on the Texas house lands inside this same regime is a question for your Texas lender, because it turns on whether that house is still your Texas homestead when the lien attaches. Ask it before you assume the bridge is your escape hatch.

Two more things worth knowing before you budget. An existing first mortgage taken to buy the house may sit alongside a home-equity loan, but the Section 50(a)(6) rules still govern the money you're taking out, and whether yours may coexist follows from how the loan you already have is characterised. Your Texas lender or a Texas attorney can characterise it, and that is not something to read off a Colorado page. And don't assume moving here released the constraint on the house you left: Texas homestead character is durable. Both questions belong in the message at the end of this piece, added to the ones already there, before you plan around money that may not be available.

The option-period play that works at home costs you the walk-away here

Colorado does have a walk-away right, and it costs nothing. What it doesn't have is one you can buy. Getting that backwards is expensive.

The Texas habit is an accepted play there: offer aggressively, buy a defined number of days of unrestricted termination for an option fee, then renegotiate hard with a free exit in your pocket. It really is close to free. Under paragraph 5 of TREC's current resale contract, form 20-19, effective July 1, 2026, the option fee goes to the escrow agent within three days of the effective date and "will be credited to the Sales Price at closing." Terminate, and the fee is not refunded but the earnest money is. So a Texan has learned that a walk-away right is a contingent price: free if you close, billed only if you use it.

Run that play here and the mechanism turns on you in a single sentence. Under the Commission-approved contract, delivering an inspection objection extinguishes the unconditional right to terminate. From that moment you are negotiating without the exit you thought you held, and if you and the seller have not agreed in writing by the resolution deadline, the contract terminates on that date by itself.

Read that as a warning about the play, not about objecting. Objecting is ordinary here. On genuine findings the seller responds and the deal closes; the mechanism bites the strategic objector, the one using the inspection as leverage on price rather than on condition, because that is the buyer who needed the exit they just traded away.

The harm is worth stating precisely, because it isn't the one people brace for. You don't lose your earnest money; a termination under a right you hold returns it. You lose the house, and you lose control of when. In practice a seller usually negotiates rather than let the clock run out, and that is the point: whether the deal survives has become their decision rather than yours. In Texas that choice was yours, and you had paid for it. If you've already objected, there's still a way back: withdraw the objection in writing before the resolution deadline.

You can still buy time here. You buy it with offer strength, by writing a later inspection termination deadline into the offer, and that costs you against competing offers rather than in cash.

A Texan reads "no option fee" as cheaper. It isn't. The money at risk has moved rather than shrunk, and it has moved somewhere specific. The deposit is exposed less by the deadline you are arguing over than by the ones that pass in silence: Loan Termination, Appraisal, Property Insurance Termination. Each is a date you have to act on, and nobody rings a bell.

One of them has no argument available at all. The Association Documents Termination Deadline gives you two options, terminate or accept, with no objection-and-resolution step in between. That is the inspection lesson in a harsher form, and it lands squarely on the newer subdivisions this piece takes up later. Every date on that calendar, and what each one waives, is in our guide to the Colorado contract deadlines; what a Colorado deposit is genuinely exposed to is the subject of earnest money and when it is at risk.

The rate falls. That doesn't mean the bill does.

The property tax rate is the first number a relocation pitch will show you. It's real. It's also the wrong comparison.

Three facts, then the part we won't do for you. Texas has no individual income tax. Colorado charges 4.4% statutory, trimmed in some years under TABOR (it was 4.25% for 2024), assessed on your federal taxable income. And on Tax Foundation's 2026 state tax data, the effective property tax rate on owner-occupied housing value is 1.4% in Texas and 0.50% in Colorado.

Put those together and the shape of the problem changes. The property tax saving is a fraction of a percent of your home's value, applied to a house that costs a multiple of the one you sold: Boulder's single-family median was $1,295,000 across the year through June 2026. The income tax, meanwhile, is new. Whether the two net out for you depends on your income and your purchase price.

There's a second half to this that rarely makes the pitch. Texas caps the appraised value of your homestead at 10% a year plus new improvements, and appraisal districts reappraise at least once every three years, so you're used to a taxable value that climbs slowly whatever the market does. Colorado has no per-parcel equivalent. Residential actual value is set solely by the market approach and reset to market on a two-year cycle. Colorado does limit property tax, but its limits restrain what local governments collect rather than what your individual house is valued at. The buffer you're used to isn't part of the design here. That reset lands with the 2027 reappraisal, and there is a protest window when it does; what to do inside that window is its own guide.

One belief travels with Texans and deserves a flag rather than a lecture: that district tax is temporary and declines toward buildout. It's well attested in Texas, where MUD rates commonly fall as bonds retire, which is exactly why it makes the trip. Colorado metro districts do not reliably behave that way. Before you shop the newer subdivisions, read what a metro-district mill cap really means and living in Berthoud for how it lands in a real town.

One more line item belongs in that carrying cost, and it's the one your Texas policy never made you think about. You arrive already fluent in hail and in percentage wind and hail deductibles. What you haven't met is wildfire underwriting. On a west-side parcel in Lyons, west Loveland or the Boulder foothills, the answer from a carrier is sometimes not a price at all but a refusal, and that is a question to settle before you're committed rather than after: can you even insure this house?

"Homestead exemption" means something else on this side of the line

The words are identical. The instruments have nothing to do with each other, which is why this one produces a genuinely confused phone call.

In Texas the homestead exemption is a real reduction in a real tax bill: school districts must provide a $140,000 residence-homestead exemption on a qualifying residence homestead. The expectation you arrive with is reasonable, which is why it's worth correcting rather than laughing at.

Colorado's homestead exemption is creditor protection. It shields $250,000 of equity, or $350,000 where the occupying owner or a spouse or dependent is elderly or disabled, from "execution and attachment arising from any debt, contract, or civil obligation." The statute doesn't mention property tax anywhere, and it does nothing to your bill. It's automatic for an owner-occupied home held in the owner's name.

The Colorado relief closest to what you're reaching for is the senior exemption: 65 or older, having owned and occupied the home for the ten years immediately preceding the assessment date, exempting half of the first $200,000 of actual value. Ten years is the operative phrase for you, because someone who moves here this year can't reach it for a decade. Other narrow exemptions exist with different eligibility tests, so confirm your own rather than reading this as the whole list. A Texan who lands and asks how to file for the homestead exemption is asking a question with no Colorado answer of the kind they mean, and that's better learned now than after it's in the budget.

Your survey, your loan officer, and the part that transfers fine

Some good news first: this part is less strange than you're braced for. Texas and Colorado are both title-closing states. The escrow-agent model you know transfers essentially intact, with no trap hiding inside it. One real difference: title rates are promulgated by the state in Texas and filed-competitive in Colorado. A Texan doesn't think to shop title, since at home there'd be no point. Here you can.

Your survey doesn't arrive. Whatever the practice was on your last Texas purchase, don't carry the expectation across: nobody in a Colorado transaction is going to hand you a boundary survey as a matter of course. What you get instead is an Improvement Location Certificate, which is not a survey and does not do the same job. If you want a real boundary survey, decide that early and order it yourself. The distinction has its own guide, is an ILC a survey?, written for exactly this moment.

Your loan officer may be fine, or may be two problems. Colorado licenses mortgage loan originators through the state, so keeping the person you've always used means first confirming they hold a Colorado license. The second problem is quieter: someone licensed here who has never worked a Colorado contract can miss the loan objection and loan termination structure, and those are dates, not conversations. Keep the relationship if you want it. Just satisfy yourself they've actually run a Colorado contract, rather than assuming a license means they have.

There's a third cost to it that nobody mentions, and in this band it's the one that bites. The listing agent will call your lender before advising a seller on your offer. A lender who picks up, knows the file and can speak to it is worth something on that call; a number that routes to a queue in another state is an offer weakness, not just a process risk.

Ask about the minerals, too. This is one piece of vocabulary that transfers intact: a mineral estate can be severed from the surface here, and a severed estate can carry surface-use consequences for whoever owns the ground above it. Ask what the mineral status actually is on a parcel you're serious about, rather than assuming it conveys with the dirt.

Buying acreage? The well permit limits what happens outside the house

The doctrine inverts at the state line, and that explains everything downstream. Under Texas's rule of capture, groundwater beneath your land is broadly yours to pump. Colorado runs prior appropriation, where water is a scheduled right held in order of seniority, and a household well is an exception carved out of somebody else's place in that line.

On a five-acre parcel that's stricter than most Texans expect. For the majority of exempt wells, on parcels under 35 acres outside a cluster development, the permit is limited to ordinary household purposes "inside one single-family dwelling, with no allowed outdoor uses," and such a well "may not be used for the watering of poultry or domestic animals unless otherwise specified on the permit." At 35 acres or more the permitted uses widen to livestock and up to one acre of lawn and garden. So a ranchette can come with water inside the house and nothing outside it: no lawn, no garden, no horse.

That comes with two qualifications, and both matter. Exempt permits issue under more than one statutory category and some are broader than the one above, so the permit itself states the allowed uses. Read it before you count on a horse. And a permit that allows a use is not a promise the county does; local land-use rules sit on top of it.

All of this is about unincorporated county land. If the parcel is inside town limits on municipal water, none of it applies to you.

Which one you turned out to be

If you sold the Texas house without ever borrowing against it, nothing in the Texas constitution touched this purchase. Your binding constraint was always the Colorado offer: what you put at risk, and which deadlines you agreed to before you understood that some of them run on their own.

If you borrowed against it, your ceiling and your calendar were set in the Texas constitution, before a Colorado address existed to attach them to. How much you could borrow was the question you knew to ask. When the clock could start was the one that decided your closing date.

The two branches don't get the same homework. If you're selling, settle the deposit and the deadlines, because those are the terms you'll be held to and they're all on this side of the line. If you're borrowing, send your Texas lender one message: "Given every lien on this house, what's the most I can borrow against it, am I inside the one-per-12-months bar, and what's the earliest you could close?" Send it before you tour.

Neither of those is a question we can answer for you, and both are cheaper to ask than to discover. When you can say which of the two you are, that answer sets the Colorado calendar. Relocating to Boulder County is the wider map if you want the ground covered generally, and if the origin question turns out to be a different state after all, selling a California home to buy in Colorado runs the same exercise the other way.

Nothing here is legal, tax, lending or insurance advice. Nothing here is advice about your Texas house, your Texas loan or your Texas homestead, all of which are governed by Texas law and belong with a Texas lender or attorney. Confirm your own situation with a CPA or an attorney before you act.