Craftsman style townhomes

At least a half dozen times a week for the last several years a regular commute takes me from Chapel Hill Road north on Southwest Durham Blvd to the Patterson Place commercial development near 15-501. Some nice apartment buildings and an orthopedic practice have gone up along this route to the shopping area that includes a Home Depot and other big box retailers.  There is also the townhouse community of Patterson Glen that has continued to build even during the last couple of grim real estate years. I have been curious about them but hadn’t taken the time to satisfy that curiosity until a client asked me to help him purchase one.

This was something of a surprise because my client had been primarily looking for something in a more urban environment.  It wasn’t much of a surprise though because every buyer agent knows that clients can easily fall in love with something they hadn’t even considered if it is presented well and the planets line up correctly and the moon is full.

On the other hand Patterson Glen has been something of a surprise since they broke ground.  Slightly out of focus these townhomes remind me of the neighborhoods in my hometown of Richmond collectively known as the Fan consisting of long streets of townhouses like Grove Avenue that fan out from the center of the city.  “Why here?” has been my question. Patterson Glen does not have the charm of being walkable like the Fan…at least not yet. When I was finally shown builder Britney Wallace’s two and three bedroom units by on-site agent Randi Edmiston I began to understand why these townhouses have sold well at a premium price per square foot even in difficult times.

The primary design influence is craftsman. Randi also describes what is called a “jewelbox” approach which means that you can get very nice features (how about a pot-filler over the high end gas range) without buying much more space than you need. The two bedroom units are a little over 1600 square feet and the three bedrooms just more than 2100 square feet. If you make your deposit early enough in the construction process, as my client did, you can choose cabinet and granite colors in the kitchen as well as paint colors throughout. Some models have central vacuum systems and tankless water heaters. All the units are wired for a digital world.  The hardwoods are real, the counter tops are granite, the appliances are stainless steel and there are lots of details that will surprise you in homes this size and price.   Another reminder of the Fan in Richmond is that day-to-day living in Patterson Glen is oriented towards the back of the homes. What we would have called at one time an alley provides access to the detached garages and  back porches.

One of the cool features about living in urban areas are the unique restaurants they seem to attract. In the Fan in Richmond there seemed to be one on every corner. That is certainly not the case with Patterson Glen but there are numerous options nearby for a quick meal in Patterson Place and right across 15-501. And, of course, you really aren’t but a few minutes away from all that is going on in Downtown Durham or the eateries on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Unlike many more urban areas, Patterson Glen is a long walk or a short drive from a very decent food store, a Kroger, in Patterson Place. It’s also a hop and a skip from a Starbucks, a Barnes and Noble, a Home Depot, a couple of good delicatessens, a Total Wine and I-40. Want a swimming pool? It’s available right across Chapel Hill Road in the Five Oaks community.

I like these homes. From a marketing point of view, the developer has found a nice little product niche that works extremely well for young professionals or downsizing baby boomers. The execution is good and as they build out the community and additional development continues to occur in the neighborhood they will become even more desirable and should appreciate nicely, IMHO.

More pictures are on the Patterson Glen website.

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Mangum 506 Condominiums in Durham

Durham videographer Wil Weldon of Growler Productions and Jesse Turner a Landscape Architect and Photographer combined their talents to produce this video for our favorite condos in Downtown Durham. Share the video with anyone who still hasn’t figured out what a really great place Downtown Durham is to live these days.

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Prime Downtown Durham

My friend and client Jesse Turner, a landscape architect and talented photographer, took the picture above that he calls Rodeo Sarah.  The Bull, of course, is the iconic bronze on the plaza in Downtown Durham that lets you know unequivocally that you are in the Bull City. Jesse also took the photograph of the Durham Performing Arts Center that the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau has used widely and is one of the photos used in the video here. Jesse introduced me to Wil Wildon, a videographer of some local note and we teamed up to see if we could produce some really spectacular real estate marketing.

The Mangum506 Condos again.

Since I wrote the last post here several weeks ago Springtree Realty and this marketing team has taken over the marketing of the remaining three units of this conveniently placed project on Mangum Street just outside the loop near City Hall. This is an honor and a special challenge for me.  Years ago when not many people were betting on Downtown Durham (or capitalizing it) I had a small part in a group that formed Downtown Durham Inc.  I served on the founding board of directors for several years as the chairman of the Marketing Committee. But for a few years I was working in Raleigh and lost touch with the revitalization effort.

Back now for several years in Durham  most of my support of downtown has been through writing frequent posts here and on SpringtreeTerritory’s sister blog, DurhamLuxRE.com promoting Durham and especially the recognition the downtown revitalization has brought the city.  But now that architect Scott Harmon and his partners in the Mangum506 including Susana Dancy have given us this opportunity,  I’m actually quite surprised that I have totally underestimated just how profound the changes have been.

The other thing that has surprised me is that the people who choose to live downtown are not just slightly eccentric urban pioneers anymore. It turns out that our Downtown has become a terrifically convenient and interesting place to live.

Take a peek at the video tour and see if you don’t agree.

506 North Mangum Street

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I taught high school English for several years after college and always emphasized writing.  The best and worst from student writing assignments I would dissect and discuss in class.  Once I got a poem I was particularly impressed with. I remember who the author was, Vic Dorr, who is now a sports reporter for the Richmond Times Dispatch, but I don’t remember anything about the poem except Vic’s reaction to my interpretation. He thought I was nuts!

Vic’s bewildered expression as I raved about his poem taught me a lesson about interpreting other people’s art…I’m not that good at it. Therefore it is with some trepidation that I venture an opinion about what architect Scott Harmon had in mind when he designed the Mangum506 Condos in Downtown Durham.

I had a chance to see the project and several of the remaining few units that are for sale a couple of weeks ago and to meet Scott and one of his business partners in the project, Susana Dancy. Scott himself and his business, Center Studio Architecture are now an integral part of Downtown.  Scott lives in a historic building within view of the Mangum506 project and Center Studio occupies what once was a pawnshop at 5 Points on Main Street.

The Mangum506 website portrays the project as lively and sexy…a happening place as we used to say. It is much different than most of the residential opportunities that started developing downtown in the 80′s with Adam Abrams’ Warehouse Condos on Duke Street. Those and the project Andy Widmark and Todd Zapolski undertook to convert the upper floors of retail space in the 5 Points area were very interesting adaptations of commercial space to residential use. In contrast, the Mangum506 units were designed from the ground up for residential use. They also directly address one of the key issues of living in a downtown neighborhood, convenient parking. Most of the units have over-sized single garages that will accommodate a car and other accouterments of an active lifestyle like bikes and kayaks or even a small workshop.

But my main reaction was different. Maybe because of my age (old) or maybe because of the time of day I visited the project (late morning), or maybe it was the cluelessness that Vic Dorr discovered about me in Junior English at BHS, but I got a totally different feeling from the project than I had expected from the website.

By all accounts the residents that are now living in the units are the smart, attractive and active professionals that you would expect.  And the colorful scheme of the building’s exterior and clean uncluttered lines are in sharp contrast to the historic tobacco warehouse aesthetic so prized in Downtown.

I’m sorry Scott if I’m missing the point entirely but what I felt was peacefulness, refuge, a safe place. What I imagined chatting with Scott and Susana in one of the units staged as a model, was a sunny Sunday morning with the New York Times, some good coffee and Dusty, walk ready,  at my feet watching the church goers finding parking and strolling to the nearby churches. Maybe some subdued classical music in the background.

Maybe that’s what Scott intended, maybe not. Siting the project in the middle of Downtown near the Farmers Market and many of Durham’s fine new restaurants and many of its government buildings certainly provides a lively contrast to the leafy blandness of many of the condo/townhouse alternatives providing similar sized space in the suburbs.

The Mangum506 project has not been immune to the downturn which has slowed sales to the point that Scott and his partners are now more open to the requests they’ve had to rent the remaining units until the economy sorts itself out.  This is not a bad thing but it would be a shame for anyone sitting on the sidelines with good credit or cash to miss the opportunity to acquire one of the remaining homes in this unique project.

I am a Realtor and I’d love to show these downtown Durham homes and represent anyone interested in acquiring one of the few remaining. But I’m also a Downtown booster and would encourage anyone looking for a unique home that is already hooked up with a buyer agent or just prefers to contact the developers to do so.  Susana is currently handling the sales and her contact information is on the site.

If you check the Durham statistics under the Local Market Explorer in the left column of this page you will see that there are signs that Durham home prices are recovering.  We can expect that the trend of Downtown redevelopment which has been carefully nurtured for two decades will continue and get stronger as the economy improves. There will be other opportunities for gracious downtown living coming off the drawing boards of developers like Scott and Susana but the Mangum506 will continue to be sought after for many years to come…my prediction…clueless or not.

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My Picks for the Ten Best Websites to Learn about Durham

If you believe that the three most important things in real estate are location, location, location, it probably seems a little bit of a paradox that the descriptions most real estate agents write about their listings barely mention it. Part of this is just habit left over from the boom days when marketing a home wasn’t that important. But some of it is a twist on the forest and the trees conundrum.

Describing the forest and not just the trees

Local agents in any market are usually so familiar with the forest, or their communities, that they forget that many potential buyers are from out of the area and are shopping for homes online. This is true for Durham real estate and Durham luxury real estate. The experience of living in identical homes in Forest Hills or Hope Valley would be totally different, to say nothing of Duke Forest, Treyburn or Croasdaile.

Researching Durham – the Forest AND the Trees

My regular readers know that much of what I write about in these posts is about our community here in Durham. I can only add some flavor to the experience but can’t cover everything. To help people who come to the site to search for a home I’ve put together my list of the top ten websites you need to check out to learn about Durham. Use this shortened URL to bookmark the post so you can come back as you continue to learn more about Durham. If you Tweet or Facebook you can use the tools at the bottom of the post to share this with your friends and acquaintances.

Number 1. The Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Exploring this site is like a day at the circus. Don’t let the official title fool you, the DCVB is Durham’s official marketing agency and has gone all out to provide information and links to everything positive about Durham. They provide a number of free subscription services too. Bloggers and other webmasters can use their resources too. For example, there’s are links in the sidebar here to the on-line visitors guide and the events calendar maintained by the DCVB. Many of the images of Durham are also provided by the DCVB. If you want just one site to learn about Durham, this is it.

Number 2. Bull City Rising.

Durham has a lively blogging community. My favorite one is from Kevin Davis, who is not a long time Durhamite but has captured the essence of what attracts so many younger people to the Durham community. Some of his posts are newsy almost gossipy, like restaurant openings but frequently he will do thorough analyses of some vital community issues. A lot of times the comments are very lively and insightful. The fact that Kevin publishes as much as he does while still working a full time job at Duke is rather amazing. He’s my blogging hero and BCR reflects a lot of the personality of the new Durham.

Number 3. Durham Cares.

Durham Cares is the brainchild of the folks at Bandwidth.com who are committed to what they call social-entrepreneurism. What the site does is link up volunteers to the myriad of organizations in Durham trying to improve our community. The really interesting feature of the site is the dozens of videos featuring people who have volunteered through the organization. Here’s a total antidote to those who still think Durham is some sort of lawless gang ridden bastard child of the Triangle.

Number 4. BestHomePro.

BestHomePro is a real estate search engine developed locally. In the last year or two they have shifted their business strategy to providing services to real estate agents by matching them with potential clients looking to buy or sell homes. Implementing that strategy has meant attracting potential clients with lots of good Durham neighborhood information. They are now the number two real estate site in the Triangle in terms of traffic and are still moving up the chart. Using the site is free including matching you with an agent. I hope if you’re on the site to shop for a home that eventually you will come to me to represent you but if you want proposals from others, BHP is the way to go. Full disclosure…I share office space with Jeff Johnston, the founder, and Brian Davis, the customer service manager and we help each other out a lot. But that doesn’t affect my opinion that BHP is the best real estate site in the Triangle…other than mine, of course, but each has it purpose.

Number 5. The Durham Chamber of Commerce.

Besides being a great place to buy a home and live, Durham is a great place to do business. The Chamber’s website definitely takes a business slant. If you are planning on moving not just you but a bunch of employees to Durham, take advantage of the Chamber’s “Make IT Durham” program that helps with relocation.

Number 6. The Independent

Indyweek.com is the website of The Independent, the Triangle’s truly independent tabloid weekly. The paper is distributed free around town especially in urban neighborhoods. If you lean to the right in your politics and social views you might not appreciate the paper or the website but it has great coverage of the arts and music scene. Although The Independent has its roots in Durham it really covers the whole Triangle so you might find its events calendar a little more comprehensive than the DCVB.  A fun site you can browse for long stretches.

Number 7. Durham Public Schools.

DPSNC.net is the official site of the Durham Public Schools. A dozen or so years after Durham’s two school systems merged the new system has started attracting accolades. This has not been easy because a part of Durham’s legacy as a textile and cigarette manufacturing center was that it was home to a large class of working poor and the problems that persist in many urban school systems. The reputation of Durham’s public schools has lagged the reality. Somewhere along the line administrators realized this problem and the system’s communications programs are now generally excellent and doing their job. The website is part of this effort and is well organized to provide information for parents that may be moving to the area. I can’t swear that it is totally unbiased but it is a good place to start to learn about public education in Durham.

Number 8. The Herald-Sun.

The hometown newspaper has not been immune to the pressures in its industry. It has gone through several evolutions in its online presence and is still struggling to find its legs on the web. But for concentrated and timely news about Durham, it can’t be beat.

Number 9. Durham County.

I prefer the county site to the city’s site for most things although both are useful.  The city’s site is definitely more attractive.  As a real estate agent I find it much easier to find out information from the tax records about Durham residences on the county site than similar information from either the Orange or Wake county sites. It’s a good place to learn about services and the city site lets you do things like pay water bills online. On city manager Tom Bonfield’s page you can sign up for his newsletter which is surprisingly full of what’s happening kind of stuff.  It’s great to see good communications efforts from our government officials.

Number 10. Duke University and Medical Center.

You really can’t talk much about Durham without talking about Duke which is the largest employer and user of office space. The medical center is one of the best in the world and Duke athletics claim at least two national championships this year…men’s basketball and men’s lacrosse. The university and the medical center have a sprawling web presence with every school and department having their own little corner. But a good place to start is the main site. One branch is the human resource area including a search tool for Duke jobs. But don’t count on really using it to find a job. The descriptions are largely boilerplate and vague and give no clue to salaries or real responsibilities. Submitting resumes is totally useless.

Honorable mentions.

1. Downtown Durham Inc. DDI had been led by Bill Kalkhof since its founding. Bill and his small staff (two additional people at the moment if I’m not mistaken) should really get credit for being the catalyst for turning around Durham’s downtown, which is not both symbol and part of the reality of Durham’s emergence as the jewel of the Triangle. The website is attractive and useful if you want to find living or commercial space downtown. Bill is an excellent writer and overall communicator and I often wish he would catch the blogging bug and add it to the DDI site.
2. BullCityMutterings. Speaking of blogs, BullCityMutterings.com is the blog of the longtime leader of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau, Reyn Bowman. Reyn is retired now and spends a lot of time on his Harley. The blog is often about “destination marketing” issues that may be obscure to most of us but as the guy who was most responsible for helping create a Durham “brand” Reyn often shares great insights about our city. Some recent thoughts about the potential for merging the city and county governments was reprinted as a guest editorial in the Herald-Sun.
3. Endangered Durham. This is obviously a labor of love that preserves the history of Durham in old photos and occasional commentary from Gary Kueber. It’s kind of spooky when these “old” photos often don’t feel all that old. One picture of an old Esso gas station reminded me of when my dad filled up his ’54 Plymouth (the family’s first car) and we would get these amber glass tumblers as a premium. Fun site and a great service to preservation.

There are dozens of sites I could have added here. Assembling the list has been a lot of fun and I learned more about the “forest” in the process. If anyone has any suggestions for things I’ve missed, feel free to let me know. If I agree that a site contributes to understanding Durham, I’ll do updates to the list.

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Some good news for real estate in Durham

Well, maybe Christmas and New Year celebrations have been a little more subdued than in recent history but there was a glimmer of hope in the statistics that I pulled from multiple listing service data for my end of the year report on real estate market conditions.

There are a lot of sources for real estate statistics but I usually compile my own by doing multiple listing searches on closed homes.  This doesn’t catch all sales because some new home sales don’t go through the MLS system and there are a few others that don’t involve a REALTOR and aren’t in MLS either. I go to this trouble because I don’t have to guess about assumptions others might make and usually I can get information a little bit ahead of other sources.

The glimmer I see is in the data I pulled on quarter over quarter sales numbers in Durham County. For the first time in two years quarter over quarter sales numbers actually ticked up. Fourth quarter closed sales were up 26% over the last year. To put this in perspective however, we have to keep in mind that the final quarter of last year was one of unusual uncertainty with the financial markets collapsing and the election going on. Recall that as the rumbles began, John McCain famously proclaimed the economy basically sound and then had an “oh oh” moment and suspended his campaign briefly to return to Washington to see what he could do to help.

In Durham, the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year were the worst sales months in at least the last five years. Compared to 2007, the fourth quarter of 2008 was down 32% in number of sales and almost 40% in terms of dollars.

But this year, the year-to-year comparison has been improving throughout 2009. The first quarter was down 32% from 2008, the second quarter down 13%, the third quarter down just 6% and then the corner turns dramatically to a 26% increase in the last quarter.

For the whole year, sales are still down about 9% from last year and 32% from 2007 before the crisis hit.

In 2007, the roughly 4654 closed transactions recorded in the MLS system represented almost $935 million. In 2009 the corresponding numbers are 3162 transactions and $621 million. There is no way to track accurately the loss of commissions to brokerages and brokers in the county but if you assume the average commission on a transaction is 5.5% the loss would be around $31 million over the two years compared to what it would have been if sales had simply flattened out at 2007  levels and not declined.

There are a couple of things worth noting here. First of all, in spite of everything there are still a lot of homes being sold. Secondly, the average sales price of homes sold in Durham was basically the same as it was in 2008 and only about $4000 less than it was in 2007. Someone smarter than I am might be able to show that buyers are actually getting more for their money and sellers lost a lot of equity. There is no way that I am aware of to extrapolate this data to show that or figure how many people are living in homes where they owe more than they could get for those homes now if they put them on the market.

Foreclosures seem to be taking more space in the classified pages than home ads these days so this glimmer of hope may be too late for some people. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, say our prayers and help ourselves and our neighbors minimize the damage until the economy picks up steam again.

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The Worst Christmas Gift I Ever Received and the Best

A recent study tried to explain how our tradition of Christmas giving is only marginally good for the economy at best… and may actually harm it. The premise is that people buy stuff for themselves that they perceive will provide some value.  However, gifts  far too often are given that the receiver doesn’t value at all. This has a negative effect on the economy.  Before economists we used to call this wasted money.

And sometimes the value of a gift is seen by the receiver as negative…sometimes really negative.

Such was the case when I was surprised one Christmas morning a few years ago with a handful of white fur collared by a red ribbon and bow.  It was a dog, a bichon frise, a breed I had never heard of at the time. According to one witness the look on my face was more horror than the glee and gratitude I tried to convey.

I probably set myself up for this though because I’ve had dogs for most of my life and had been talking idly about rescuing one from the pound.  But I had also thought it through and made it clear that I realized that it wasn’t a good idea. We lived in a house with a pool but no fenced yard. Both my new wife and I were commuting to Raleigh every day to work and try to keep afloat a company she had started shortly before we met. This meant many hours away from home every day including many weekends.

If the choice of a little white bichon as a gift for a big athletic guy seems a little odd one should keep in mind that appearances are more important to some gifters than others.  In this case I believe one motive was to preempt me from bringing home some big scraggly mutt from the pound.  Like poodles, bichons also don’t shed, which I’m sure factored into the decision. Unfortunately, for the gifter, whoever advised her didn’t make clear that even such fancy puppies still need to relieve themselves and have a tendency to not understand that things like expensive shoes serve a purpose other than their need to teeth.

When you’re handed a responsibility you do what you have to do.  I walked the dog early and often to try to avoid accidents. I left the office at 5:00 so he wouldn’t be alone too long. I fed him and bathed him and before long we started to become buddies.

The first disagreement the gifter and I had over the dog was about naming him.  I invoked my right as the giftee to make the decision and after several weeks decided on Dusty because he reminded me of a fluffy dust mop.  I also banned the groomer from putting ribbons in his hair or going to inordinate lengths to tease it up, which is how bichons are shown.

The relationship between the gifter and I deteriorated over the next couple of years. Dusty was just one issue but it got to the point where the ultimatum came…”The dog goes or I go.” After thirteen years Dusty and I are still together and the gifter is long gone.  What started out as a unappreciated  but loving gesture and a responsibility I didn’t ask for ended up well. I don’t know what I fear the most now, outliving Dusty or not outliving him and he isn’t cared for when I’m gone.

Over the years here’s what I’ve learned about dogs and real estate:

1. No matter what you pay for a dog or how fancy the breed and the name, it’s still a dog. Dogs naturally pee, poop, and chew when and where they feel like it.  They can be trained but unless you plan to keep them outside all the time, they will make housecleaning a little more challenging for a while. If you are really fastidious,  get a cat. Dusty and I lived with a cat all of his 13 years and 20 of mine. Bix died last year and we both miss her, although, if the truth be known, she didn’t have much personality as cats go.

2. A fenced yard is good,  although for many people a little forced exercise walking a dog is a good thing. Even though we have a fenced yard now, Dusty still insists on his walk every evening and no matter how tired I am, I’ll let him set the direction.

3. The world is divided into two types of people, those that love dogs and those that don’t. Even so, when you put your home on the market do everything you can to stage your home as “dog free.”  This can be very difficult in the real world, but necessary.  Dogs in the house are a distraction for buyers from both groups.

4. Dogs don’t make good surprise gifts.  OK, that has nothing to do with real estate but it’s a good lesson anyway.

5. A good reason to buy a house is so you can have a dog. Dogs always make me sentimental around Christmas. Before there was Dusty there was Dozzie. Dozzie was a pound pup that my first wife and I picked out at the shelter in Winston-Salem when we lived there.  We decided to wait until after our holiday travels to bring it home to our daughter. Christmas day at the family dinner table I gave Steph a card and wrote in it “This is a gift certificate for one doggy.”  Mistaking my “g”s for “z”s she asked, “What’s a dozzie?” The name stuck.

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College athletics will never be reformed because the would be reformers have it all wrong.

I graduated from Notre Dame in the sixties with a degree in English Lit and some swag to remind me that I was a small part of a National Championship football team. Now that I live in Durham I follow the Duke football team almost as closely as I do my old alma mater. In fact, in the forty plus years since I graduated I’ve seen way more Duke games in person than Notre Dame games.

The two schools that are the objects of my fandom have a number of things in common.  They are both relatively small for universities competing in the highest level of college football, they both have sound academic reputations and both are perennial leaders in graduating their football players.  Both also just finished seasons that started with promise but ultimately disappointed.

Notre Dame dismissed its coach.  For Duke it was one more losing season in several decades of futility.

The low points in Duke athletics in the last few years have surfaced a debate that simmers within the University about the emphasis on athletics.  One of the more vocal proponents for “reform” on the Duke campus is a cultural anthropology professor by the name of Orin Starn.

During the notorious scandal involving Duke’s lacrosse team in 2006,  Starn took the opportunity to write in the local papers and lay out an argument for a more Ivy League approach to athletics  that I’m sure is held by many in the academic community. This argument hasn’t really changed since the days I spent shivering during practices in the icy winds  of northern Indiana.

Starn’s target back in 2006 was Duke’s basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, whose earnings and influence were apparently hard to stomach among the circle of faculty members Starn represented.  Targeting Krzyzewski seemed odd because the basketball program had nothing to do with the lacrosse team and Coach K’s players  graduate at high levels including a number of outstanding citizens…think  Grant Hill and Shane Battier.

As the real story behind the charges leveled at the lacrosse players unfolded and the hoax was revealed it looked more and more like Starn had been the too clever Brer Rabbit waling away at a tar baby set in the road by Brer Fox.

Rather than cook and eat him after he was stuck in the tar baby,  Starn was thrown back into the academic briar patch where he was raised up.  Now it seems he’s picked the tar from his fur and is back in the paper sassing what he hopes is a more vulnerable target, the football coach, David Cutcliffe.

My guess is that he has probably misjudged the situation again.  Coach David Cutcliffe is extremely popular and even though Duke didn’t have a winning season they played well against tough opponents,  were vastly improved and fun to watch.  I predict that Starn’s argument will win no one over any more than it did the last time.

Starn and I have vastly different opinions about how college athletics should be reformed.  He’s for de-emphasis. I’m for elevating the sports even more and awarding degrees in football, basketball, track, etc., maybe even awarding masters degrees for national championships and doctorates to All Americans.

I’ll make that argument, in great detail too, to anyone willing to buy me a beer. Neither of us is going to get our way, however, because college athletics works fine just the way it is on many levels.

Ok, you’re wondering what this has to do with real estate.  Quite a bit I think. College athletics is often criticized by its academic critics like Starn of being a business, as if this somehow robs the institution (with a renowned business school, no less) of its academic purity and prevents student-athletes from getting a well rounded education…blah, blah, blah.

Coach K would argue that a top notch athletic program provides an exceptional experience for the athletes and is an enriching feature of the overall college experience for all students.

I would argue that this benefit extends to the community.  Duke athletics is not what has put Durham on the map, but it draws a lot of attention to it. More than that,  the athletic programs help create a real sense of place.  Go anywhere  in the country during basketball season and tell someone that you’re from Durham and you’re likely to hear “How ’bout them Devils.”

It’s hard to imagine South Bend as a community without Notre Dame football weekends. Economically and culturally,  successful teams have a broad unifying appeal on campus and the community.

Paradoxically, an area like the Triangle, blessed with three major research universities with big time sports programs,  is not really divided. The rivalries bring us together in gut ways even the finest museums,  business enterprises, and yes, academic programs,  could never do.

So, if you’re an agent and were writing copy for your listing in Duke Forest, a neighborhood originally developed by the University to attract faculty and staff,  would you mention that you were in walking distance of Wallace Wade Stadium?

Can you paint a picture of a beautiful fall day with the pennants flying and parents walking towards the stadium with kids in tow past happy tailgaters cheering and jeering each other merrily?

Because communities sell houses, good listing agents sell the community.  In a community like Durham we can only hope that Orin Starn gets out of the briar patch…er…library occasionally and enjoys the excitement football brings to the campus and the community.

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Thanksgiving is often looked at in the industry as the end of the fall season for selling homes and the beginning of the “dead season” during the winter months.

It’s not true.

I’ve often wondered whether this myth was purposely advanced by successful agents so that they could either 1) Take a little break themselves for the holidays or 2) trick their competitors into taking off the holidays so they could have an advantage soliciting listings.  There also may be a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy here as agents advise potential sellers to “not risk looking stale in the spring by marketing a home during the winter.”  There are lots of other excuses…it gets dark too early for after work showings, the holidays are just too chaotic to schedule showings, there’s too much Christmas advertising going on to get noticed, yada, yada, yada.

In Durham the numbers do confirm that there is a sharp drop off during the colder months, on average for the last four years of about 40%.  But that means that there are still a number of homes sold during the winter months and the market is anything but dead. The average number of closings in Durham County during the last four years for the four nastiest months was 1053 compared to 1738 for the four nicest months of the year.  That four year period includes two pretty good years and the last two not-so-good years.

When is the best time to put your home on the market?

The conventional wisdom is that the buyers come out in the spring. But if so many people wait  for the buyers then it simply means there is more competition among sellers during the spring. The more you dwell on the pros on cons of the different seasons the more you conclude that there are more exceptions to the “rule” than situations that fit.

The best time to put a home on the market is when the seller needs or wants to and when the home is ready to be marketed.

Apple didn’t launch the IPhone before they had crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s in their product development cycle.  That included hardware (really cool), software (even cooler), distribution (AT&T -not so cool), pricing (make the early adopters pay heavily before lowering the price for the masses) and promotion (start a buzz at MacWorld with Steve Jobs’ presentation and let word-of-mouth take over.)

You shouldn’t put your home on the market until you do the same thing. It’s a little different when you are selling just one home but the process deserves the appropriate analysis, planning and preparation. This winter too there are significant buyer incentives available from the government for both first time homebuyers and those “moving up” after 5 years in their existing home.

Winter is not a dead time in real estate. It can be very lively for those sellers who have a tightly integrated marketing plan for their home.

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. The six part series addressed the topics described below.  I’ve assigned all these to a category I’ve created for the occasion called “Marketing Series.” This means that all six  plus and this summary can be accessed from the “Categories” drop down menu in the right sidebar of the site. I’ve also made the outline that follows links to the individual posts that will each open in a separate window (in Internet Explorer) or a separate tab ( in Firefox) if you want to read them in the order they were posted.

1. The Marketing Plan

Set’s the stage for the rest of the series.

2. Pricing

Pricing is paradoxically more difficult but less important in the luxury home market than it is for “commodity” homes with lots of good comps.

3. Product

We think of the product in terms of bricks and mortar but it is much more than that. Location is important but not under your control.  There are lessons from other industries about enhancing the product that can be applied.

4. The Internet

The internet isn’t just about mastering technology. The savvy agent knows how to take advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities to improve marketing.

5. Promotion

Thoughts on writing good copy with some suggestions about making copy more sensual.

6. Channel Marketing

Applying a concept from B2B marketing to the marketing of homes. In other words, focusing some of your marketing effort on the buyer agent.

Please feel free to share any of this with anyone you know contemplating selling a luxury home or even your agent if you already have one  through the “Share This” button at the end of each post. You can also contact me directly at jay@jayzenner.com or by my cell phone at 919.819.6666.