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.

For over 20 years Reyn Bowman has been the leader of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau and nobody has spent more energy urging the citizens of Durham to shed our sheepishness and confront those from neighboring communities who badmouth living in Durham. Lots of stuff is coming on line to brag about but some things have been around a long time. One of those is the annual American Dance Festival. If you follow this link to the ADF home page there is an incredible slide show of photographs by Sara D. Davis.

Reyn covers this topic in a recent post on his blog. It’s worth peeking at. In fact, it’s worth subscribing to Reyn’s blog by adding it to a “feed reader” on your computer. The one I use is free from Google and lets me keep track of a number of blogs that relate to Durham and real estate marketing. His post also includes a link to an article from the New York Times on this years festival.

If you can’t find enough positive information about Durham here on the Durham Luxury Real Estate blog, you can always find more on Reyn’s Bull City Mutterings.

I feel a little guilty here. It’s been two weeks since I’ve posted anything even though there are plenty of great things happening in Durham that enhance our ability to market luxury homes . Being on vacation would be a decent excuse but the truth is I’ve been working harder then ever mostly on a consulting gig to re-launch what was already to best home search tool available anywhere…and it is being developed right here in our hometown of Durham, North Carolina by BestHomePro. The older version is what is on the search page of this site. Even this older version is the most comprehensive tool available but it takes some playing around with to really understand and take advantage of. Besides allowing you to search on over 60 features (most search tools typically allow a number in the low teens) the new version was specifically designed for ease of use and speed. Adjusting the search area on the map or changing one of the other search parameters automatically changes the results. The mapping capability also lets you see where important community features like schools, medical facilities and shopping are located relative to the search results.

For an agent or blogger like myself that is focused geographically, BestHomePro allows the creation of pre-set “search strings.” For example, on a page that describes the Hope Valley Neighborhood, I can put a link that pulls up a search focused on the area around the country club. I plan to add these as soon as the new version is ready for prime time which should be within the next two weeks.

If you would like to take a peek at the prototype system you can click the link. It is still a little “buggy” and may not allow you to save searches but you can see the improvements. If you want to use the old system, all the features are available and any saved searches will still be available after the conversion the new version.

Lot’s of buzz last week at Rotary about the Somerhill Gallery grand opening event the previous Saturday at the old Venable warehouse in Downtown Durham. The relocation of this long term fixture of the Chapel Hill cultural scene to Durham is just another thing to brag about when marketing Durham’s luxury homes. This video was the fourth of four posted on YouTube about the move. View this one here or click YouTube and view all four.

The Venable Center is another project of Scientific Properties, one of the development companies making a big impact on Durham. Click on the link for more about Venable Place and other Scientific Properties projects.

Caught in the dialog on the video is the strong possibility of the opening of another new restaurant in Downtown Durham adjacent to the gallery. Can’t wait to visit myself.

Since about 1987 except for a few years when I was living in Durham but working in Raleigh I have been a member of the Downtown Durham Rotary Club. This club is over a hundred years old and Durham’s largest Rotary Club. For the last couple of years the program committee headed by Don Stanger has had some of the best programs that the club has ever had. (Don is also the current president of the Hope Valley Homeowners Association.) The program today was the final one in a series of five programs about media that Don organized with the help of Dr. Phillip Meyer of UNC’s journalism school.

The topic today was “new media” and the panel included two of Durham’s most prominent bloggers, Kevin Davis of Bull City Rising and Gary Kueber of Endangered Durham. Although the goal of these programs has been to share insights about the evolution of the media, because both Kevin and Gary blog about Durham the discussion ended up more enlightening in terms of Durham’s transformation. I highly recommend that anyone interested in civic life in Durham, take the time to use one of the free services like Google Reader to subscribe to these blogs. One of the interesting aspects of the program this afternoon was Professor Meyer’s attempt to elicit some indication from these panelists about how they might “monetize” their efforts or, in other words, make some money doing what they do. It’s pretty clear that neither has that in mind or even thinks it’s possible in the near term. They do what they do more out of service and passion for the community than any hopes of making a lot of money. My motives are not that pure.

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The link is to a terrific post last month to Reyn Bowman’s Bull City Mutterings. It relates Durham’s growth to the growth in the number of hotel rooms and the importance of tourism. Very interesting way of looking at things. Reyn is the leader of the Durham Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and has been aggressively selling the community’s image for many, many years. His leadership is responsible for the “branding” effort that was discussed in a post here this week. I’ve added Bull City Mutterings to the blogroll on the left and added it to my Google Reader and encourage anyone interested in a unique perspective on Durham to do so also. As mentioned many times before, Durham’s image, or brand, has to catch up with the remarkable developments that are taking place to really ignite the luxury home market.

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.

This has nothing to do with luxury real estate in Durham but it could mean the difference between enjoying it or not. I’ve been a gym rat most of my life. I’m now on the back end of middle age and can still handle some pretty heavy weights but bad feet and knees made me give up real running several years ago. I can also still get a pretty serious workout in on a stationary bike or an elliptical trainer and my resting heart rate is less than 60. My problem is that a couple of nagging little injuries have made me really feel old. It seems my flexibility has disappeared. (more…)

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 his very popular book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Steven Covey tells a story about a man who comes to him at a seminar and confesses that he does not love his wife anymore and wants Covey’s advice.  Covey tells him to love her.  It takes a little more conversation for Covey to make the point that love is a decision. Now, I most emphatically do NOT endorse this as a way to pick a mate, but I do think it makes sense to embrace the community that you live in, or for Durham listing agents, the community that you are trying to make a living in. (more…)

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… (more…)

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. (more…)

In the free report available from the link on the sidebar I mention that I wrote much of the report during a period that I was also involved in a Rotary Club project to build a Habitat house in east Durham. Yesterday I attended a dedication ceremony for that house and one directly across the street that was sponsored by several Durham congregations. Everyone involved in these projects including the full time Americorp volunteers, are there to help folks struggling to realize the American Dream of home ownership.  However, it also became clear to me that a possibly unintended consequence is that it helps the whole community by giving it something to be proud of.

Anyone who hasn’t ventured east on Main Street from downtown in a few years might be surprised how the corridor is being transformed. These Habitat houses are on Franklin St. which runs parallel to Main for a few blocks on either side of Alston Avenue. The west end of Franklin ends at the old Golden Belt plant which is being transformed by Andy Rothschild’s Scientific Properties into a mixed use facility for an emphasis on the arts, especially studio space for artists.  For anybody interested in a very detailed review with pictures of what this is all about, I recommend another blog called “BullCityRising.” A link to the site is on the left sidebar and you can go directly to the post last month about Golden Belt by clicking here. If you explore the whole blog you will see that it covers this kind of development much better than either of the two local newspapers. It is this kind of information that must be reported over and over again to burnish our image and improve our real estate markets.  If you are interested in what else Habitat has going on in Durham, click here.

Nature takes over

One of my first memories of downtown Durham (when “downtown” was still lower case) was of a fox running down Chapel Hill Street past the empty storefronts where the Civic Center is now east towards the post office. I’d just moved to Durham to become the Marketing Director of Central Carolina Bank.  I’d left a position with a much larger bank in downtown Richmond and an office in a brand new building with a spectacular view of the historic Virginia state capital that Thomas Jefferson designed. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The fox seemed to symbolize nature reclaiming the barren streets of my new community. (more…)