I was naive. Maybe too cocky. But definitely wrong.
With this blog that began almost two years ago, I had hoped to contribute to a revival of the luxury home market in Durham. It didn’t work. The collapse of the overall real estate market didn’t help, of course, but the numbers are still pretty dismal.
The way I defined the luxury market was those homes listed for at least $700,000. In some areas of the country before the bust, this would barely be a starter home but here that could buy you quite a lot.
But it is also well past the threshold where homes in this market start to have many luxury features. At $700,000 the market in Durham is relatively small. Seldom has the inventory of homes above that price gone over 80 homes. Currently it is only 56, a very small number considering there are over 1800 total listings in Durham and almost 11,000 in Durham, Wake, Orange and Chatham Counties.
The second problem is that Durham has consistently only had about 35 sales per year at $700K or better for the last several years. The interesting thing is that it has stayed close to that level even during the bust while sales have dropped dramatically in the other three counties looked at. This means that Durham’s market share at that high end has doubled from about 5% to almost 10%. But that is still well short of its overall market share of about 18%. So, we’ll move the threshold down to $450,000.
My original decision to focus on Durham was not as arbitrary. I’m an unabashed Durham booster. I’ve been here 25 years and I love the place. But focusing on Durham exclusively in the luxury market ignores the fact that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Many of the people buying high end homes are moving here from someplace else, usually to work at RTP or one of the area’s three major research universities and they don’t make the distinctions that long term residents do. Right from the beginning, I’ve struggled with how to treat the homes that are in Durham county but have Chapel Hill addresses in neighborhoods like The Oaks. So, I’m going to take a wider view and cover all four counties but with more emphasis on the western side of the Triangle.
I’ve briefly considered changing the name of the site to represent these changes, but frankly that would give up what the webmasters call “google mojo.” Without doing anything for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but writing a lot of posts, the site is usually the first or second result for “Durham luxury homes” and “Durham luxury real estate.” It’s also usually one of the half dozen local sites in the much more competitive “Durham real estate” that make it on to the first or second page of the search results. The number of daily visitors to the site is pretty impressive for a part time one person with no technical chops effort. The downside is that most of the visitors don’t stay long when they see how narrow the focus is.
So, we’ll stay DurhamLuxRE.com; Durham still is the center of the world after all.
I’m also going to freshen up the look of the site. I always thought it was OK but then I started playing with a new theme on my other two sites, SpringtreeTerritory.com and 4PsRE.com. DurhamLuxRE suffered by comparison. You already see the switch to the new theme, but I still need to work on the graphics and modify each of the 80+ posts so that the pictures show up on the “teasers.”
I hope you’ll stay with me while the changes are being made. I’ll continue to try to make it interesting and topical to those interested in living well in this community.
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