NEW YORK — Lori Osterberg and her husband are lifelong Denver folk, but they got restless and intended to relocate for adventure’s sake once their only child left home for college.

Well, long story short, they did that. Sort of.

Rather than following the sun down to Mexico, they followed their daughter to Portland, Oregon, where she is a sophomore. While still taking long weekends and other trips to Canada and California, the couple bought an apartment near campus that all three share.

“We’re calling it our gap year,” Osterberg said.

Sometimes scoffed at as the ultimate in helicopter parenting, Osterberg and others see only benefits in relocating or buying a second home to be close to their college kids.

Coldwell Banker, the real estate firm, first noticed parents making such moves in 2008 while compiling its annual College Home Price Comparison Index that ranked average home prices in more than 300 college towns. David Siroty, a company spokesman, said the index has not been done in several years but anecdotally agents continue to see it pop up in home rentals and sales around the country near campuses.

Regina Santore, a Coldwell agent in Knoxville, the East Tennessee home of the University of Tennessee, relocated a couple last summer from a town about 380 miles away on the western side of the state so their freshman could live with them.

“They felt very strongly they did not want their daughter living on campus. They felt like she would have a better study environment if she were with them. She didn’t seem to have any problem with it,” Santore said.

The father, a computer programmer, and mother, a budding restaurateur, settled on a 1,600-square-foot ranch-style house near campus.

More common in Knoxville, Santore said, are parents buying weekend condos so they don’t have to fight for hotel rooms when attending football games at UT’s 100,000-plus-seat stadium. The school has about 21,000 undergraduates.

A surprising twist for Roslyn Levy, a Coldwell agent in Gainesville, Fla., was parents making the move there first, followed by their kids transferring later to the nearly 50,000-student University of Florida or Santa Fe College, a feeder.

“We do see parents moving here or buying a second house here, either because they have a child in school here or because they went to school here themselves,” Levy said.

Some, she said, keep the house once the kids move on.

Sheila Baker Gujral in Maplewood, N.J., is a Georgetown alum who interviews prospective freshmen for the Washington, D.C., school. She’s been volunteering to do that for 10 or 15 years and only last summer ran across such relocations.

“I was talking to this girl and asked how her parents were doing about her leaving,” Baker Gujral said. “She said, ‘They don’t mind living on the East Coast or the West Coast, so I’m applying to those places.’ I was, like, “They’re going to move wherever you go to school?’ and she said yeah. She didn’t look entirely thrilled about it.”