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.
One of the primary themes of this blog is that the revival of the luxury home market in Durham depends heavily on escaping the image of Durham as “the armpit of the Triangle” as described by one of the commentators. If that was ever true it certainly isn’t now. Listing agents in Durham can have an important role in updating that image. There is plenty to brag about. The report available in the sidebar to the left is my attempt to list some of these things and describe the neighborhoods in Durham where luxury homes are likely to be found. Yet, every day I think about something else I should have included in the report. The natural tendency is to focus on the home when writing copy for a listing, but when there are so many choices for luxury buyers in the Triangle, the community is part of the product that is being sold.
The second interesting link from the story is an interactive map to find homes for sale in Durham. The link takes you to a map of Durham on Trulia.com, which is one of a number of web sites “aggregating” listing information from a number of sources. The interesting thing about Trulia and similar sites is that they aren’t comprehensive in all areas. In other words, not all homes for sale are shown. If you were a buyer that landed on this site through CNNMoney or someplace else, you wouldn’t necessarily know this, however. It is rapidly becoming more and more important to maximize the exposure for a listing to get them on all these other sites when they go on the market. A person who starts their home search on the internet, and most people do, and used Trulia for the search, might never even see your home in a relevant search.
