MarketWatch.com on the Wall Street Journal Digital Network recently reported on research that indicated that the country’s wealthiest citizens believe that it’s a good time to buy real estate. We agree with that. Borrowing rates are still good for the credit worthy and opportunities abound to negotiate with nervous sellers. Click the link for the full story.

This blog was originally intended primarily for Durham residents wishing to sell luxury property. The link on the sidebar for the 2008 Luxury Home Report provides some strategies for improving the marketing of luxury homes in Durham. However, since the blog was begun it is starting to show up in searches on the key search engines. This means that buyers as well as sellers will find the blog. To make the site more useful to buyers, especially those moving to the Triangle from other areas, I have created another report entitled “A Newcomer’s Guide to Luxury Real Estate in Durham.” I would also send this to any inquiries I received from other sources about the area. This is part of the strategy of not just selling a home to a prospect but also selling Durham since luxury home buyers often can go anywhere in the Triangle. The report is in a PDF format that you can read in Adobe Acrobat. Click to open and read, save, or print.

Newcomer’s Guide to Buying Luxury Real Estate in Durham

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.

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…)