I have made some minor changes to the site to help navigation and to promote the objective of improving market conditions for the Durham luxury market. Quite often people find blogs such as this through search engines. Blogs with frequent posts and links from other sites eventually work their way up the search engine ranking and that is starting to happen. The first priority is to reach sellers with a message about employing more sophisticated marketing techniques in a post-boom market where there are more sellers than buyers. Inevitably this also attracts potential buyers. Therefore it is important that the blog not just preach about the importance to the market of promoting our luxury neighborhood, it has to do it.
The first, and most important thing is to begin posting information about the various neighborhoods and their amenities. The post on historic Hope Valley is the first post with that focus. Secondly, a “category” box has been added to the sidebar so that someone exploring the site can go directly the to topics that most interest them.
Finally, a report is being developed that will be offered free through a link in the sidebar to buyers interested in the Durham Luxury Market.
In my conversation with a mortgage executive in Cary last week (that’s not him in the picture,) he questioned me about the wisdom of focusing on the luxury market in Durham. I believe he used the expression “tilting at windmills.” Why focus on one of the few stagnant segments of what, until recently anyway, has been a robust market? Is Durham generally still stuck in a decades long ditch that it won’t get out of in my lifetime? Unfortunatly, this reflects a widely held view around the Triangle that makes climbing out even tougher. It was hard to argue that Durham was ready to lose its rough and ready reputation when the day before our lunch I could see the police helicopter hovering for hours over a nearby neighborhood while police were trying to flush out the young thug on parole who was eventually arrested for murders of a Duke student from India and the UNC student body president. Like the still festering lacrosse case, this brings unwanted worldwide negative attention. Still, these are my reasons for sticking with Durham…
In the last post I talked about the $23,000,000 listing in Raleigh that was reduced to $12,000,000 in January. Even at $12M it’s still the most expensive listing in the Triangle MLS. But there are markets where that’s run of the mill. The picture here is of an estate in Lake Tahoe that is listed for $100,000,000. I follow a couple of other blogs on luxury homes in other areas of the country and I saw this on one of those. If you are interested in who buys this kind of home I can recommend a book recently published by Robert Frank entitled Richistan:A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich. By and large this blog won’t address the fraction of 1% of families with the resources to buy this kind of property but I did find it interesting how the writer described it because it provides an illustration of how “post-boom” listing agent/marketing directors must do a better job of positioning all properties, but especially luxury properties.
When I wrote the Durham Luxury Home Report for 2008 (which is available through a link on the sidebar on the left) the most expensive listing in the Triangle Multiple Listing Service (TMLS) was an estate in North Raleigh that was listed at $23,000,000. This property had been on the market at that price since September. On January 8th the price was reduced to $12,000,000, a reduction of almost 50%. What’s this about? 

Nature takes over