After college and teaching for several years I decided that I wanted to try the corporate world. When I went shopping for appropriate business attire, a close family friend advised that when I bought a suit to always ask the merchant to throw in a shirt and a tie. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

By that time I had already bought my first home and between then and now I’ve owned about 15 different personal residences. Not once did I question the commission that the real estate agent got in any of those transactions. I really can’t explain why not. With that many transactions a little negotiation on a few of them might have bought a lot of shirts. But I probably wouldn’t have negotiated for shirts either if my friend hadn’t suggested it. (more…)

MarketWatch.com on the Wall Street Journal Digital Network recently reported on research that indicated that the country’s wealthiest citizens believe that it’s a good time to buy real estate. We agree with that. Borrowing rates are still good for the credit worthy and opportunities abound to negotiate with nervous sellers. Click the link for the full story.

Fortune Small Business recently ranked Durham number 12 in the country in its list of the 100 best places to live and launch a business. The complete list and the write up on Durham is linked here at the CNNMoney website.

The short write-up is what you might expect about the high-tech environment, cultural opportunities, restaurants, college sports rivalries, etc. There are a couple of links on the page that are also quite interesting. The first is to comments submitted by readers as “Talk back. What do you think of Durham.” Some are very negative but most of the negative ones are from people that used to live in Durham or live in Raleigh. (more…)

Originally the link in the left sidebar to the Durham Luxury Report for 2008 took you to a landing page which captured a name and email address that had to be verified before access was given to the report. The system provides statistics on who has shared this information and downloaded the report. There was a small handful of people who shared their email addresses or an invalid one that never downloaded the report. When I added the second report, the Luxury Homebuyers’ Guide, the link I provided on the left went directly to the report and did not require an email address or verification. Without any promotion at all this report has been downloaded twice as much as the other in just a few short weeks.

Since my primary purpose is to get this information about turning around the luxury market in Durham into people’s hands, I’ve changed the link on the sidebar to take you right to the report which is in PDF format and can be downloaded, printed, saved or just read online. I should warn you, this is not a simple topic and the report is long…not book length…but not just a few paragraphs either. So, if you passed up getting the report because you didn’t want to share a valid email address, now you don’t have to worry about that and you can be anonymous. Click here or on Luxury Marketing Report in the sidebar to get your copy.

The Herald-Sun offered Paul Andrews the opportunity to talk about why he and his wife chose to live in Durham and how they feel about the decision now. Paul  moved here from the Northeast almost 20 years ago.  His “Other Voices” column on the editorial page of today’s paper adds to the chorus of people who have reflected on the developments that have occurred in the last twenty years and those underway now that are making this a pretty special place to live. It is truly heartening to see more people actually admitting that they enjoy living here and that it’s not quite so fashionable to take that cynical “only in Durham” attitude during any discussion of the city’s problems. (Although, I did hear exactly those words from a Durham native in a meeting in Raleigh this weekend.)

It’s true that all real estate markets are local. We always have the choice to spin the glass as half full or half empty…or we can just keep our mouths shut. No one will ever accuse me of being a “new age” type but I do believe that the momentum for positive community development and even good government rides on the tide of positive community feelings. If any group has a vested interest in seeing this happen it should be real estate marketers. Thanks to Paul Andrews for his contribution to a positive message. For my contribution see the sidebar for a newcomers guide to luxury homes in Durham.

If you are interested in how luxury homes are being marketed locally you can spend about a half hour on line and learn a lot. As a Broker and REALTOR I have direct access to the information in the Triangle Multiple Listing Service but a better way to get the broad picture is to use the REALTOR.com search which is available to anyone. This morning there are 84 Durham County listings of at least $700,000 or more. Interestingly, if you do the same search on REALTOR.com you get 90 listings. The difference appears to be that on REALTOR.com there are several Colvard Farms listings that are there because they are in the 27713 zip code and have a Durham address. (There are a total of 139 homes over $700,000 for sale in Chatham, by the way.)

On Realtor.com here are some things to look for: (more…)

In its April 28th edition, Business Week reports on a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that may require re-thinking a little bit the economic theory of the diminishing marginal value of the dollar and price elasticity. In the study the subjects who were students were placed in an MRI machine and given sips of red wine. One of the wines was presented twice, first as a $5 per bottle wine which was its real price and then as $45 per bottle wine.

All the subjects said that they preferred the “more expensive” wine. This was mirrored by increased activity in their prefrontal cortexes. In other words, the perception created the reality. The fact that they thought they were sipping a more expensive wine really was more pleasurable.

The article also quoted Baba Shiv, an associate professor of marketing at Stanford, where the study was conducted. “There’s a temptation among marketers to keep reducing prices,” he said. “We’re saying be careful before embarking on that strategy.”

In an earlier post here we speculated how the sellers of a luxury estate near Lake Tahoe arrived at the nice round number of $100M for a price. Wouldn’t it make more sense to drop the price by a thousand dollars and make it eight figures instead of nine? Not necessarily. Isn’t it interesting that that the price might be part of the product and not just related to the product for the same reason that the points on a buck’s rack are important to a trophy deer hunter. When I see a luxury home priced a thousand or a hundred dollars less than a round number, for example, $899,900 instead of $900,000, I alway think of the Wal-Mart smiley face with the “falling prices” sign in their TV ads. The more unique a luxury home is, the more difficult it is to objectively determine a “market price” and until the right buyer comes along even deep price cuts may have little impact. Unlike most segments of the housing market, price is less a factor in the marketing mix for luxury homes.