From the category archives:

Other Stuff

Somerhill Gallery Event

June 23, 2008

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 [...]

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Bull City Rising in Endangered Durham

June 16, 2008

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 [...]

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Durham’s Growth

June 11, 2008

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 [...]

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Site Change – Easy Access to Lux Report

May 9, 2008

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 [...]

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Site Changes

March 31, 2008

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 [...]

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Love the One You’re With…

March 24, 2008

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 [...]

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Rough and Ready Durham

March 16, 2008

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 [...]

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How about a $100M Home?

March 10, 2008

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 [...]

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Habitat in East Durham

March 9, 2008

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 [...]

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The Fox

March 7, 2008

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.  [...]

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