Durham-Chapel Hill MSA Highlighted

For many years the contrast between the vibrancy of the luxury home markets in Durham and those in Chapel Hill has been stark. Chapel Hill has boomed and Durham typically has two and a half years worth of inventory on the market. The joke was that the best thing that could happen to the Durham luxury home market would be to be to get Chapel Hill to annex Durham and give everyone in Durham a Chapel Hill address. Ha ha.

I never thought that was funny but a blog post on BullCityRising got me thinking about how the distance between the two communities is shrinking in a lot of ways. The post is about an article in Bon Appetit magazine covering how “Durham-CH has become one of the country’s foodiest small towns.” Unnoticed by me until recently, Durham is now the lead city in the Metropolitian Statistical Area (MSA) that includes Durham, Orange and Chatham counties. I made a quick stab at trying to research when this divorce from Raleigh and Wake County took place but couldn’t come up with anything. However, I doubt that it is cause as much as effect of what you see when you look at where development is taking place.

Much of my attention has been focused on the revitalization of Downtown Durham and the positive impact that it is finally having on Durham’s image. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of the most active development is going on between Durham and Chapel Hill. The short trip east on highway 54 or I-40 from Chapel Hill takes you to Southpoint, with some of the best shopping in the region and much commercial development. A great deal of development is also occurring on the 15-501 corridor between the South Square area and Chapel Hill. The road improvements on this stretch will only stimulate more interaction between the communities. Two of the region’s really nice upscale communities, The Oaks and Meadowmont, actually straddle the county line, albeit with Chapel Hill addresses by virtue of being in the 27517 zip code. There is actually more activity in the Chatham County luxury home market than in Durham proper, although they are both in the same SMA led by Durham. Less visable but also important is the residential development along and off Erwin Road and around the Koristan Division of Duke Forest.

What does this mean for the luxury home market in Durham? I can see the day when most people moving here for the region’s high tech industries and research universities will be less aware of the historic distinctions between the communities. But that day is not here yet. Today the owner of upscale property in Durham still faces uncertain prospects and a lot of competition if they desire to sell. There is still a need for exceptional marketing to stimulate sales in Durham’s several really fine neighborhoods. It still amazes me that most of the current efforts in this area still focus on the “bricks and sticks” when this is the least likely thing to turn the tide. Durham still suffers from an image that is out of touch and out of date. Real estate agents need to be in the forefront of selling the community and its numerous amenities to agents in other areas of the region and to buyers around the world. The Bon Appetit article highlights just one of these…our foodie community. For more details on how to make this happen see the report on the Durham luxury home market that launched this blog site.

For profiles on Durham's luxury neighborhoods and current listings or market statistics click the links.

Durham Luxury Real Estate 2nd Quarter Repost

From www.DurhamLuxRE.com As we pass Memorial Day, the Summer solstice and Independence Day, the dog days of summer are upon us. We’ve also had more consecutive days with rain than many of us can remember. But even if drought fears have receded a bit, sales of luxury homes in Durham have been sparse and July and August are not typically strong months even in the best of times.

Last year in the second quarter 15 homes in the $700,000+ category where sold in Durham. This year it was 7 and the dollar volume was down 49% from $14.7M to $7.5M. Since there were 11 sales in the first quarter, the year-to-date comparisons are not so dramatic; 21 sales in 2007 compared with 18 this year and dollar volumn down just 18.8%.

Both Orange and Wake Counties saw significant drops in the sales of luxury homes in the same pattern. There are two differences, however, between Durham and the other two markets. The first is that Durham listings in this luxury category represent only 8.4% of the homes while it has over 17% of the total listings in the three counties. Second, it had only 4% of the sales in this category in the second quarter. With 86 homes on the market there is enough inventory to satisfy the demand for more than the next two and a half years.

These statistics shouldn’t surprise anyone in the real estate community that has been following the luxury market in Durham for the last several years. What does surprise me is that there doesn’t seem to be any change in the marketing practices employed by the listing agents that are active in this segment in Durham. Durham is undergoing a revival led by events downtown many of which have been mentioned in posts on this site. The quality of the luxury housing stock as well as convenience to shopping, entertainment and the major employment centers, in most cases is as good or better than anything in Wake or Orange counties. The difference is that Durham is dealing with an out-of-date image that holds back sales. Sooner or later that image will catch up with the facts on the ground and the market will improve. Listing agents that market the entire experience of living in Durham and not just the bricks and mortar of their listings will be the first to benefit and help move the whole market forward.

From a marketing perspective the long term solution is to do a better job of promoting Durham and its unique and growing list of assets. The Newcomer’s Guide to Buying Luxury Real Estate in Durham available through the link in the sidebar is my attempt to provide one arrow in the quiver necessary for this effort. It may be a little too personal to plagiarize verbatim but I hope every agent who lists in this market creates something similar or an improvement upon it and distributes it widely.

However, market share and long term strategies to promote Durham’s renaissance are irrelevant to the family with a home currently on the market. There are strategies that are not widely applied today that break with tradition as well as employ new technology to better position and promote a listing. The other report available on the sidebar, The Durham Luxury Home Report 2008, describes some of the details about how to do this. Both reports are offered with no obligation.

The Durham Luxury Real Estate Market

As part of my real estate practice I have created another blog devoted to upscale homes sales in Durham. The market for high end real estate in Durham has been flat for a number of year. Sales over $700,000 have averaged about 32 per year and typically about 75 or 80 homes in that price range are on the market. This means that there is usually twice as many...or more...homes for sale than the market can absorb in a year. This is not good news for someone wanting to sell one of these homes. On the blog, www.DurhamLuxRE.com a report is available called The Durham Luxury Real Estate Market 2008 that suggests a number of strategies that must be adopted to solve this problem. The first involves attracting more of the luxury home buyers coming to the Triangle. Currently Durham only gets about 5%. The second strategy is to do more sophisticated marketing for the homes that are on the market.

A Dog Story

I have often expressed my fondness for Durham's "texture" by which I mean that it isn't a carbon copy of dozens of cities across the Southeast. Durham has it's neighborhoods that might not be that much different than neighborhoods in those other cities but the combination of ethnic diversity, high tech opportunity, universities, cultural activities and sports make it pretty special. However, every once in a while a story comes along that illustrates what I mean without mentioning any of these things. The link is to a local blog called BullCityRising by Kevin Davis. I've never met Kevin but his "about me" says that he has only been in Durham since 2005. It also says he has a job which is amazing because he is the most prolific blogger on the good things happening in Durham that you could possibly imagine. This particular post is a dog story. However, if you scroll through the blog you will see some great reporting on the development going on in Downtown Durham, most recently Greenfire's development plans. Over ten years ago I was one of the businessmen on the founding Board of Downtown Durham, Inc. Prior to that I had served two terms as the chair of the Chamber's downtown revitalization committee. Bill Kalkhof was the first and only president of DDI and IMHO should get a lion's share of the credit for getting the ball rolling for the revitalization of Durham's core. Never in our wildest dreams or greatest hopes back then could we imagine some of the stuff that is coming out of the ground now. Still I come back to the heart warming story of tracking down a lost dog as an illustration of Durham at its best. Enjoy. http://www.bullcityrising.com/2008/02/beans-return-a.html
Jay

Million Meals

I'm a proud member of the Rotary Club of Downtown Durham. This year I'm the publicity chairman. The first event I undertook to publisize was our participation with Duke, NCCU and Stop Hunger Now in the Million Meals campaign. NCCU really took the lead in the publicity, so for our part I did a guest editorial in for the Herald-Sun. The first draft was about 1200 words and the paper asked me to get it down to about 800. This was tougher than writing it in the first place but I did it. I do tend to run on. It was much tighter at 800 words but I had to drop a lot of the detail. I did get good reviews from the people who saw it and were thoughtful enough to say anything. Below is the longer version.

A Million Meals…

A full year before President Kennedy was assassinated in the late fall of 1962 it was generally acknowledged that the two best high school football teams in Richmond, the old capital of the Confederacy, where, improbably, Benedictine, a small parochial school, and Maggie Walker, one of the two “colored” high schools in a segregated school system. Some of the parents at both schools saw an opportunity to make some money for the respective athletic associations and briefly attempted to schedule a postseason game between the teams. The city fathers, unsure of what would happen if an all white team faced an all black team for the first time, would not allow the game to be played at City Stadium and the idea died away. As a senior on that Benedictine team I’m a little ashamed to admit that I wasn’t disappointed. It had been a long season and I was beat up, tired of practicing every afternoon and saw no reason to risk our perfect record playing against a team we knew nothing about. Maggie Walker was never included in the “Metro” rankings in the newspaper and had to travel to other communities to schedule games with other Black segregated schools.

Coincidently, after college I spent my brief teaching career split between those same two high schools but I had pretty much forgotten about that incident until 1972. There was a lot of history made in the intervening years including the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King. I was teaching English at Maggie Walker. It had been officially integrated a few years earlier…I was the first white guy to play on the faculty basketball team…and only about 3 or 4 percent of the students were white. One day in the lunch room I was introduced to a visitor who was one of the school’s most famous graduates. Willie Lanier was then a star linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs and was eventually inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame. Willie, it turned out, had been on that high school team back in 1962 and had a very strong memory of how disappointed they had been that they were not allowed to come out of the shadows and demonstrate how good they were against us and our “All-Metro” players.

All this came to mind on the evening of January 23 while I was trying to make myself useful as one of the Rotary Club volunteers at an annual event on the NCCU campus coordinated by Stop Hunger Now and sponsored by the Triangle United Way, Duke, NC Central and Rotary, as part of the Million Meals campaign. Many of the Rotarians present were also members of the staffs and faculties of the two schools. I’m sure some will think I’m as clueless now as I was in 1962, but what struck me was how all this came together with little consideration of race.

The goal for this night was to package 75,000 meals. Three rows of long tables where set up with funnels and bins of the ingredients where teams of 5, mostly students from the two schools, were mixing the ingredients in plastic bags. In what appeared to be determined chaos and usually indicates good planning, other teams kept the ingredient bins full and moved the unsealed bags to another long row of tables where each bag was weighed, adjusted, and sealed. From there they went to another row of tables were they were packed in shipping boxes.

This was billed as a Martin Luther King Day event and snatches of his speeches were backed by the beat heavy music provided by a Rotarian turned disk jockey. But this was background, sort of like theology is at a church picnic. The primary theme here was feeding the hungry and having a good time doing it. A chorus of cheers went up every time a gong was struck indicating another 1000 meals were ready to go. The bagging didn’t stop until well past the goal when there were no more plastic bags and some of the ingredients were used up. Many of the volunteers who had been there for both of the two hour shifts stayed on to break down the tables, sweep the floor and otherwise clean up even as the last bags were being sealed and packed.

As notable as the accomplishment of packaging all those meals was, what really made an impression on me were the students from both schools. Besides the tremendous energy and focus on the tasks, these were people who were comfortable in their own skins, comfortable with each other regardless of race and even comfortable with us folks from another age. After all, President Kennedy and Dr. King are as far removed from them as I was from Woodrow Wilson in 1968 when Dr. King was shot. It’s taken a lot of pain and many epiphanies but we’ve come a long way since then.

When I left the Walker Building about 10:20 my feet and my knees hurt but I felt good about what I had seen. Elements of the NCCU marching band were still on the football field practicing, a sound that is part of the urban ambiance of nearby Forest Hills…still my favorite neighborhood, even though I don’t live there anymore.

I decided to take the most direct route home. This took me east on Lawson and then north towards town on South St. South runs parallel to the old railroad right-of-way that is now the American Tobacco Trail and through the St. Teresa neighborhood which has seen its share of troubles over the years. The first intersection is Apex St, so called supposedly because it was the highest elevation in the city. Indeed, the intersection does provide a grand view into a revitalized downtown. However, when the dilapidated Apex St. Bridge, which spans the Trail, was closed to through traffic a few years ago it became for some a symbol of the racial divide. I had used the bridge almost daily for several years when I was commuting from Forest Hills to Raleigh, which is why I knew the route so well.

The next intersection on South is Enterprise St. On this particular night there were a half dozen people near the corners in the shadows just out of the dim glare of the street light. For all I really know they were out late on this cold night to share a little conversation, but the sullen body language of the hooded figures was in sharp contrast to the energy I had felt from the hundreds of college students back on campus. The short trip became a back-to-reality reminder, perhaps, that the movement Dr. King helped lead is not finished. Even after all these years there is much work to do, many more meals to package, and many more people to bring out of the shadows.

Willie Lanier was never destined for the shadows. After leaving the NFL he returned to Richmond and became a successful stockbroker and supporter of a foundation created in his name to provide financial and academic support for high school students and help them enroll in Black Heritage Universities. He and Arthur Ashe are the only two athletes ever honored by the Virginia Press Association as Virginians of the Year. Durham has its own heroes like them who escaped with spirits intact from the 60s when ignorance, veniality and meanness dominated so much of our race relations. I’m pretty sure some of them were anonymous participants at the event at NCCU the other night helping to pack meals while passing the torch along to another generation.

How important is football?

I sent the following response to an editorial in the Herald-Sun suggesting that Duke might be wise to lower its expectations for football. If you read on, you will see that I question several of the editorial writer's assumptions. This response was not published. There are several possible reasons for this. First, they had just published a scolding response of mine to a story on downtown Durham . (They have a 30 day rule.) Second, this one like the first was as much an attack on them as an opinion about an issue. Third, it was over 250 words. (I was really hoping for "guest columnist" status, which often dominates their editorial page. They have so far given this status to two other responses to their editorial including one from an assistant athletic director at Duke.)

I don’t know why it drives me a little crazy every time the Herald-Sun starts pontificating about college athletics. The latest example is Monday’s lead editorial “Why is football so important?” which, of course, deals with the possibility that Duke might upgrade its so far unsuccessful program.

But before challenging some the editorial writer’s assumptions, let’s throw the question back. Why, indeed, is football so important to the paper? There have been other leadership transitions at Duke in recent months with potentially much more direct effect on reputation, personnel and students than the football coach will ever have under any circumstances. I don’t recall an editorial about any of these or even as much news coverage as the high school football playoffs get. Does devoting an entire section every day and assigning reporters permanently to sports compromise the integrity of the paper to gather and report other news?

But setting aside any potential hypocrisy in the Herald-Sun’s position, let’s examine some of the assumptions that lead to the conclusion that Duke should consider lowering its goals for a competitive 1-A football program. The first is that there are a limited number of top high school football prospects in the country. Actually, the playing field has never been leveler. By limiting the number of scholarships that a school may offer, the NCAA has prevented the powerhouses from stockpiling talent. It has improved the competitiveness of numerous schools, made the college game more interesting and given more top athletes a chance for playing time.

It is precisely because it makes it tougher for athletes to get admitted that the football program at Duke has suffered. I take exception to the assumption that almost everyone agrees that standards should never be waived. In fact, they are waived all the time for any number of reasons including so-called legacy admissions. Since the number of football players represents such a small percentage of the student body even in a small school like Duke you could virtually eliminate academic standards for them without a ripple in the average SAT or GPA. What is really irksome is the additional assumption that talented and disciplined athletes don’t add something positive to the academic community in the same way equally talented musicians, dancers or theatrical performers do.

I have no idea what is being considered to upgrade Wallace Wade Stadium other than that if would take of “a ton of money,” using the paper’s not so precise metric. I also don’t know how much it is going to take to add the new wing to the hospital or build Central Campus but you can bet it will be a lot more than anything the most ardent football fanatic could dream up for the stadium. Based on the attention the football program is getting in the media you could easily conclude that upgrading the football program would reorder all of the university’s priorities. Does anyone really believe this is the case?

It is far from heresy for Duke to consider competing in football at a lower level, in fact, it’s gospel for some in the academic community. However, to think that upgrading its program puts the university on a slippery slope to academic perdition is ridiculous. Ask Southern Cal or Stanford or Penn State or Wake Forest or Notre Dame or dozens of other competitive schools.

If Duke makes the strategic decision to downgrade its football program life will go on because football really isn’t that important. But it would be a shame. Marketing guru Seth Godin would probably describe a competitive football program at Duke as the “prize in the cereal box” or that added extra something of little consequence that adds appeal and luster to a product. This would be good for the university, good for the community and maybe even good for the hometown newspaper which is struggling like all newspapers to find reasons why people would want to read them every day.

The School Board - first article

You have got to wonder what is really going on at Shepard Middle School that would motivate a parent by the name of Minnie Brown to organize Concerned Black Citizens for the sole purpose of ousting the principal, herself Afro-American, for being too rough on certain black students. Juxtapose this with the pressure recently to reduce the number of suspensions meted out disproportionately to black males, the evidence that gang activity is a serious problem in this town, the backlash against Bill Cosby for strongly suggesting that blacks that want to participate fully in our society should at least conform to the language of that society if not its basic values and the pressure to meet educational standards set by the state.

The school board, the superintendent and the principals and staff have very tough jobs where they can't please everyone. The crux of the issue is where you draw the lines between education, social work, and law enforcement. Maybe you can't. At the risk of seeming much more conservative than I am, where I come down now is that the primary role of our school system is to educate those willing and able to attend. Everything else is secondary. Young people who by their presence disrupt or endanger that mission should be suspended or explelled. The "right" number of suspensions is that level that insures that the students who do desire to learn, can do that in a safe environment that supports skills development and intellectual activity. That line should also be observed by parents and even school board members.

Other people will draw that line in a different place thereby involving the school system to a greater degree in social work and law enforcement. To convince me they will have to show why the brunt of the consequences of bad behavior should be borne by the innocent, the students who want to learn. If Minnie Driver, her child, Jackie Wagstaff, and the rest of Concerned Black Citizens, don't like it they should be sentenced to watching all the reruns of the Cosby Show.