Is southeast Colorado Springs a good place to buy near Fort Carson?

Southeast Colorado Springs is the quadrant of the city south of Platte Avenue between Academy Boulevard and the open prairie past Marksheffel Road, with Fort Carson's east gates at its southwest corner and Peterson's runways at its northeast. It is where the city meets the post: the older streets were built for Carson families in the 1960s and 1970s, and the new subdivisions along Marksheffel are being built for the same families now.

Who lives here and why

Soldiers who want to live in Colorado Springs proper, close to the post, at a price that still works on a junior or mid-grade allowance. The older part — the grid of ranches and split-levels between Academy and Powers, around Pikes Peak Park, Deerfield Hills and Southborough — is Harrison District 2, mature trees, quarter-acre lots, and a lot of long-held rentals. The newer part is Lorson Ranch and the subdivisions strung along Marksheffel Road south of the airport: two-story tract homes on small lots, built from the mid-2000s through today, in Widefield District 3, with an HOA and a metro district. The two halves share a commute and a price band and almost nothing else, so decide which house you are buying before you decide which street. The Fort Carson guide sets the quadrant against the rest of the metro.

The commute

Gate 3 off Academy Boulevard is ten to fifteen minutes from the older streets, and Gate 20 at the end of Fontaine Boulevard is ten to twenty from Lorson Ranch, which is the point of living here rather than farther north. Peterson is ten to twenty minutes up Powers, so a dual-installation household with one at Carson and one at Peterson has the shortest combined drive in the metro from this quadrant. Downtown is fifteen to twenty minutes, and the Air Force Academy is a long way north. Airport noise reaches the northern edge near Platte and Powers; drive the street with the windows down before you write.

Housing stock and what the appraiser sees

Two houses, two appraisals. On the 1960s–1980s stock the Minimum Property Requirements come up the way they do in Security-Widefield: roofs at end of life and hail-aged on top of it, furnaces and water heaters of the same vintage, electrical panels that draw a condition when they are unsafe, and the lead-based paint rule on anything built before 1978 — chipping or peeling paint has to be corrected before closing. A large share of these homes have been rentals for years, so deferred maintenance is the norm and an inspection is worth more than the appraisal. The appraisal page covers how conditions get negotiated. On the Lorson Ranch and Marksheffel tracts the appraisal is usually clean, and the questions move to the paperwork: a builder with a VA builder ID on new construction, the warranty, and a hard look at incentives tied to the builder's lender, which the new-construction page walks through. Everywhere in the quadrant, expansive clay means slab and foundation cracking gets noted and an engineer's letter resolves most of it, and radon is worth a test.

The item that moves the payment most is not an appraisal item. Lorson Ranch and most of the newer Marksheffel subdivisions sit in a metropolitan district, a special taxing district under the Colorado Special District Act that repaid the developer's roads and pipes with a mill levy on the property tax bill. The older streets west of Marksheffel carry no such levy. Two houses at the same list price, one on each side of that road, can be two different monthly payments, and the lender uses the actual tax bill. Ask for the district's levy in the first showing, or pull it from the El Paso County assessor, before you compare prices.

The loan angle

Southeast prices are where a first-use, full-entitlement VA loan does most of its work in the city: no down payment and no loan limit, and a payment that Fort Carson BAH carries with margin on the older stock. Run the BAH-to-payment calculator with the real tax rate for the house you are looking at, not the county average, because the metro-district levy is the difference between the two halves of this quadrant. A soldier back for a second Carson tour with a VA loan still open elsewhere is in the second-tier calculation, and at these prices it nearly always clears without a down payment. An older house that needs more than cosmetic work is a candidate for the VA renovation option, with the repairs rolled into the loan. At the next PCS either kind of house rents to the next rotation; the renting-out page is the decision. Colorado's disabled-veteran exemption is on the Colorado benefits page.

Next

• See BAH for Fort Carson →
• Compare nearby neighborhoods →

Around Fort Carson

• Buying Near Fort Carson: The Colorado Springs VA Loan Guide
• Colorado Veteran Home Buying Benefits
• The PCS Home Buying Guide