Durham Video

February 24, 2009

Tweet Holy cow! How did I miss this.  If you like Durham you’ll love this.  If you thought you didn’t like Durham, this might make you reconsider. If you just overpaid for a home in Chapel Hill this might be depressing.

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Durham Image Watch

February 24, 2009

Tweet A recurring theme here at DurhamLuxRe.com is the importance of bringing Durham’s image in line with reality.  For years Durham had a reputation for chaotic government, poor schools, high crime rates and a crumbling downtown.  Some of the reputation might have been deserved but much has changed and the Durham that is emerging not [...]

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Let’s Twitter Around Durham Luxury Real Estate

February 18, 2009

Tweet I’ve resisted the idea that old dogs can’t learn new tricks but recently getting my arms around the usefulness of the so-called “social media” like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has been difficult. But I’m finally getting it, I think, maybe. It turns out that they can be useful and a lot of fun. In [...]

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Owner Financing?

February 7, 2009

Tweet I get bombarded with solicitations for money making “opportunities” that are vague about what is required until the offerer gets a credit card number and makes some money themselves. While I was writing the last series of posts about marketing homes in a buyers market, I received one of these solicitations in the US [...]

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2008 Year End Summary

January 10, 2009

Tweet If you thought the market for luxury homes in Durham couldn’t get much worse, you were… right. Durham finishes the year with 34 sales of homes that listed for over $700,000, although two of the four that sold in the 4th quarter closed for less than that threshold.  In 2007 there were 38 sales, [...]

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Series Summary

December 26, 2008
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Tweet We all appreciate tips With more sellers than buyers in the real estate market across the country, listing agents will need to employ more sophisticated approaches to marketing homes. In the Durham luxury home market, which had been slow even before the general market decline, these new approaches require even more urgency.  The preliminary [...]

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Channel Marketing in Luxury Real Estate

December 23, 2008
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Tweet Stan Lee and Me The many years I spent in bank marketing I thought were pretty interesting but I notice that people’s eyes glaze over when I talk about how bank marketers had to learn a whole new set of skills during the period of deregulation in the late 70′s and early 80′s and [...]

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Changing the Present

December 23, 2008

Tweet I had intended on finishing the five part series on marketing luxury homes in the current environment before I left for a few days for Christmas and I may still, but I ran across this video that might interest any luxury blog followers that are still trying to think of meaningful gifts to give.  [...]

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Promotion and writing copy

December 22, 2008
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Tweet Well I am a guy after all. The most dramatic lesson I ever had about writing copy wasn’t even written down. I was shopping for a car and had my eye on a used Infinity Q45 that was at a Lexus dealership in Raleigh.  As I was pondering my decision the salesman happened to [...]

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Web Presence in the Luxury Market

December 21, 2008
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Tweet Using the Web to Sell Luxury Real Estate in Durham Sometimes I wonder as I delete the 100th spam email that somehow gets past spam filters whether the internet will be like our financial system and someday collapse under its own weight. The internet can be profane, invasive, distracting and misinforming. It gives voice, [...]

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The Primacy of Product

December 18, 2008
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Tweet While Real Estate waits in vain for a hero to come along and rescue it, sellers should get smart. If you ever need your spirits lifted around Christmas and have seen It’s a Wonderful Life about ten too many times, pretend like you’re twelve again and watch a dog story. I was going to [...]

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Pricing in Today’s Market

December 16, 2008
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Tweet Pricing in the luxury market is trickier than in what might be called the “commodity home” market. The more unique a home is the more pricing becomes an art than a science. As a ridiculous example in a post in March I used the  an estate in Lake Tahoe pictured below that was on [...]

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Christmas Present

December 15, 2008
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Tweet Two Themes Anyone planning to put a luxury home on the market in the spring will start thinking about it months in advance under normal conditions. Since conditions in the real estate market are anything but normal now, Christmas is not too early to begin planning a market launch in the spring. The Under-performing [...]

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Durham Historical Calendar

December 12, 2008

Tweet I got a nice note today reminding me that not all that is great about Durham is shiny and new like the Performing Arts Center. Shelly Green, the COO of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau emailed me that she had put a copy in the mail to me of the 2009 Historical Calendar [...]

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Style in a Down Market

December 1, 2008

Tweet A brief article in the business section of the New York Times this morning chronicled the impact the economic downturn is having on publications geared to the upscale market including the quarterly from Time magazine called Time Style and Design and the NYT’s occasional New York Times Style Magazine. These publications, of course, are [...]

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