Regular visitors to the site may notice that the blog is no longer front and center on the home page. Those of you who read the posts via a RSS feed in a reader like Google Reader may not notice anything. But in place of the blog the new landing page for anyone going to www.DurhamLuxRE.com is a page titled Luxury Neighborhoods. This page has links to a page each for the seven key neighborhoods in Durham with the majority of luxury homes. Each page reflects my take on the character of those neighborhoods. I strongly believe that a key to a better luxury market in Durham is constantly reminding buyer agents all over the Triangle and buyers from all over the world of the unique character of our communities and our neighborhoods. Each neighborhood page also has a link to a search centered on that community for easy access to the available properties in those neighborhoods.

This change marks another step in shifting the emphasis of the site to meet the needs of buyers. This is because…to my surprise…the site does very well on search engine results for luxury homes in Durham which means it is likely to be attracting buyers as well as the potential sellers I have been attempting to solicit through networking and mailings. To supplement this “organic” search engine traffic I am also beginning an Adwords campaign that will rotate an ad in the “sponsored search” column on relevant Google searches. I am determined to put the best aspects or our community up front for potential buyers wherever they are coming from and am hopeful other Durham agents will do the same thing.

There’s a very interesting post over at Reyn Bowman’s blog about the sources of negativity about Durham. Reyn, of course, is the leader of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau and for 20 years has researched and documented the sources of negativity about the Durham community.  One conclusion is that much of the word of mouth trashing of Durham comes from a very small percentage of the population in nearby communities that use that all to common tactic of building themselves up by tearing others down.

Reyn has always had to walk a line similar to what is being attempted in this blog. How do you point out the sources of negativity without calling attention to the negativity itself? Reyn and the DCVB are just like I or any Durham real estate agent in that we are trying to sell the community. Without much real effort at SEO (search engine optimization) DurhamLuxRE.com is consistently landing on the first page of results for several key search phrases. This means that buyers from all over the world and not just local sellers can easily stumble upon it. (more…)

Ella Fountain Pratt died last week at age 94. The Herald-Sun front page story on July 30th chronicled her long and enduring impact on the arts in Durham. When I came to Durham in 1984 to be marketing director of Central Carolina Bank, the bank was small by regional or national standards but still one of the few corporations of any size that was actually headquartered in Durham. As the administrator of a sizable marketing budget and the bank’s charitable contributions, I suddenly found myself thrust into the middle community life in a way I had never been in my hometown of Richmond.

One of the things that I was asked to do was serve on the board of the Durham Arts Council which is where I met Ella Fountain Pratt. However, my most vivid recollection of her was the force she was during the production of the street opera at Brightleaf Square. The bank had been asked to help underwrite part of the cost of the production to the tune of $10,000, an amount that seemed huge at the time. While she seemed to effortlessly oversee the production, I was struggling mightily to convince branch managers to use the tickets we had by virtue of our sponsorship to host their best customers at the event. She was more successful than I was but I still remember the event as one of those key turning points when a few influential people began to see that there might be some hope for downtown Durham. A few years later as one of the founding board members of Downtown Durham, Inc. we recognized that arts were already there as a foundation to build a revitalization campaign. It’s taken twenty years but it actually seems to be working.

In more recent years, when I’d occasionally see Ella Fountain Pratt around town she always had a cheerful greeting and I could see a vague sense of recognition in her eyes of me as someone that may have helped the effort in the distant past. However, there is no doubt of the role she played in Durham’s cultural life. There are, in fact, a lot of people that never gave up on Durham and she was one of them. Several others are mentioned in the Herald-Sun article and there are many more that struggled on while skepticism remained the more fashionable attitude. Ella Fountain Pratt certainly deserves an honored spot in Durham’s mythical hall of fame.