There’s a very interesting post over at Reyn Bowman’s blog about the sources of negativity about Durham. Reyn, of course, is the leader of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau and for 20 years has researched and documented the sources of negativity about the Durham community.  One conclusion is that much of the word of mouth trashing of Durham comes from a very small percentage of the population in nearby communities that use that all to common tactic of building themselves up by tearing others down.

Reyn has always had to walk a line similar to what is being attempted in this blog. How do you point out the sources of negativity without calling attention to the negativity itself? Reyn and the DCVB are just like I or any Durham real estate agent in that we are trying to sell the community. Without much real effort at SEO (search engine optimization) DurhamLuxRE.com is consistently landing on the first page of results for several key search phrases. This means that buyers from all over the world and not just local sellers can easily stumble upon it. My original purpose in launching the blog early in the Spring was to convince sellers in Durham and their listing agents to sell the community and not just houses. This is especially important with the luxury home market in Durham which has been in the doldrums for a number of years. Because of this, I’ve been shifting the emphasis to what is great about this community and added a special report on buying luxury property in Durham. But every once in a while we have to remind ourselves that there are those in nearby communities, including real estate agents, that see the good things happening in Durham as a challenge to their own sense of superiority.

There are a number of people like Reyn who have spent a good part of their professional careers not only promoting Durham but helping create the real substance of our claims to be a great place to live and work. It’s time for all agents in Durham to take advantage of it in every piece of copy they write about a listing for flyers, email campaigns to other agents and listing information that is now easily syndicated on dozens of web sites. There is much more detail on how to do that contained in the Luxury Home Report available through this link or the link in the left sidebar.

Ella Fountain Pratt died last week at age 94. The Herald-Sun front page story on July 30th chronicled her long and enduring impact on the arts in Durham. When I came to Durham in 1984 to be marketing director of Central Carolina Bank, the bank was small by regional or national standards but still one of the few corporations of any size that was actually headquartered in Durham. As the administrator of a sizable marketing budget and the bank’s charitable contributions, I suddenly found myself thrust into the middle community life in a way I had never been in my hometown of Richmond.

One of the things that I was asked to do was serve on the board of the Durham Arts Council which is where I met Ella Fountain Pratt. However, my most vivid recollection of her was the force she was during the production of the street opera at Brightleaf Square. The bank had been asked to help underwrite part of the cost of the production to the tune of $10,000, an amount that seemed huge at the time. While she seemed to effortlessly oversee the production, I was struggling mightily to convince branch managers to use the tickets we had by virtue of our sponsorship to host their best customers at the event. She was more successful than I was but I still remember the event as one of those key turning points when a few influential people began to see that there might be some hope for downtown Durham. A few years later as one of the founding board members of Downtown Durham, Inc. we recognized that arts were already there as a foundation to build a revitalization campaign. It’s taken twenty years but it actually seems to be working.

In more recent years, when I’d occasionally see Ella Fountain Pratt around town she always had a cheerful greeting and I could see a vague sense of recognition in her eyes of me as someone that may have helped the effort in the distant past. However, there is no doubt of the role she played in Durham’s cultural life. There are, in fact, a lot of people that never gave up on Durham and she was one of them. Several others are mentioned in the Herald-Sun article and there are many more that struggled on while skepticism remained the more fashionable attitude. Ella Fountain Pratt certainly deserves an honored spot in Durham’s mythical hall of fame.

For over 20 years Reyn Bowman has been the leader of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau and nobody has spent more energy urging the citizens of Durham to shed our sheepishness and confront those from neighboring communities who badmouth living in Durham. Lots of stuff is coming on line to brag about but some things have been around a long time. One of those is the annual American Dance Festival. If you follow this link to the ADF home page there is an incredible slide show of photographs by Sara D. Davis.

Reyn covers this topic in a recent post on his blog. It’s worth peeking at. In fact, it’s worth subscribing to Reyn’s blog by adding it to a “feed reader” on your computer. The one I use is free from Google and lets me keep track of a number of blogs that relate to Durham and real estate marketing. His post also includes a link to an article from the New York Times on this years festival.

If you can’t find enough positive information about Durham here on the Durham Luxury Real Estate blog, you can always find more on Reyn’s Bull City Mutterings.

I feel a little guilty here. It’s been two weeks since I’ve posted anything even though there are plenty of great things happening in Durham that enhance our ability to market luxury homes . Being on vacation would be a decent excuse but the truth is I’ve been working harder then ever mostly on a consulting gig to re-launch what was already to best home search tool available anywhere…and it is being developed right here in our hometown of Durham, North Carolina by BestHomePro. The older version is what is on the search page of this site. Even this older version is the most comprehensive tool available but it takes some playing around with to really understand and take advantage of. Besides allowing you to search on over 60 features (most search tools typically allow a number in the low teens) the new version was specifically designed for ease of use and speed. Adjusting the search area on the map or changing one of the other search parameters automatically changes the results. The mapping capability also lets you see where important community features like schools, medical facilities and shopping are located relative to the search results.

For an agent or blogger like myself that is focused geographically, BestHomePro allows the creation of pre-set “search strings.” For example, on a page that describes the Hope Valley Neighborhood, I can put a link that pulls up a search focused on the area around the country club. I plan to add these as soon as the new version is ready for prime time which should be within the next two weeks.

If you would like to take a peek at the prototype system you can click the link. It is still a little “buggy” and may not allow you to save searches but you can see the improvements. If you want to use the old system, all the features are available and any saved searches will still be available after the conversion the new version.

The lead editorial today in the Durham Herald-Sun is headlined “Durham’s message is getting around.” It sites a poll that seems to confirm that the residents of Wake and Orange counties increasingly have a favorable view of Durham. It cites the efforts of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, The Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Durham, Inc. for doing a better job of telling Durham’s story.

One can agree with everything the editorial states but still have mixed feelings about it’s appearance at this point in the game. Why now? The editorial writers didn’t just notice the dramatic developments or the impact they would have on our neighbors to the east and west.

Of more concern, however, is why more Realtors, especially in the luxury market segment where homes need wide exposure, aren’t actively promoting Durham and her neighborhoods more aggressively around the Triangle. The copy I see on “e-flyers” and on Realtor.com is still focused on the bricks and mortar and ignores half the experience of owning a home in the Durham Community. Amenities like the DBAP sell the community. Many people risked their reputations and political careers to push the DBAP and now the Performing Arts Center. It could be that we’ve been defensive for so long that we’ve forgotten how to be proud of our community. How often do we encounter phrases in copy like “prominent Durham address” or “in the heart of historic Hope Valley.” This is not false pride. This is not spin. This is not hype.  This is the duty we owe to our clients to show their homes in the best possible light.

The Durham Luxury Home Report for 2008, discusses in more detail specifically how to use the Durham’s growing list of amenities to promote luxury home sales. This is available in a pdf format and does not require that you register or provide any information.

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.

Seth Godin is an author, marketing guru and blogger whose posts are often short and sometimes cryptic but always interesting. This is a short post from June 20th that has relevance in the Durham luxury home market today.
Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.

It’s not true.

You need to increase your value. If people don’t want to pay, it’s because you’re not delivering enough value for the money you’re charging.

You’re not selling a commodity unless you want to.

How does this advice apply to real estate, especially luxury real estate?

As the CEO of a small business with one purpose…to sell your home…in a slow market it is quite conceivable that your marketing director/listing agent and potential customers would put pressure on you to lower the price. The irony is that often you don’t have to add value as Godin suggests, all you have to do is point it out. Levittown, PA was the original “commodity” suburb, with row after row of similar houses…six models actually…built after World War II. Luxury homes are the antithesis of commodity homes. Yet so much copy written about luxury homes focuses on commodity features such as size and rooms and not the experience of living in the home or the community. Size and quality in the shelter component of a luxury home are a given. The added value comes from the less tangible things. To get the best price the marketing materials need to illustrate these things.

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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 the fourth of four posted on YouTube about the move. View this one here or click YouTube and view all four.

The Venable Center is another project of Scientific Properties, one of the development companies making a big impact on Durham. Click on the link for more about Venable Place and other Scientific Properties projects.

Caught in the dialog on the video is the strong possibility of the opening of another new restaurant in Downtown Durham adjacent to the gallery. Can’t wait to visit myself.

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 has had some of the best programs that the club has ever had. (Don is also the current president of the Hope Valley Homeowners Association.) The program today was the final one in a series of five programs about media that Don organized with the help of Dr. Phillip Meyer of UNC’s journalism school.

The topic today was “new media” and the panel included two of Durham’s most prominent bloggers, Kevin Davis of Bull City Rising and Gary Kueber of Endangered Durham. Although the goal of these programs has been to share insights about the evolution of the media, because both Kevin and Gary blog about Durham the discussion ended up more enlightening in terms of Durham’s transformation. I highly recommend that anyone interested in civic life in Durham, take the time to use one of the free services like Google Reader to subscribe to these blogs. One of the interesting aspects of the program this afternoon was Professor Meyer’s attempt to elicit some indication from these panelists about how they might “monetize” their efforts or, in other words, make some money doing what they do. It’s pretty clear that neither has that in mind or even thinks it’s possible in the near term. They do what they do more out of service and passion for the community than any hopes of making a lot of money. My motives are not that pure.

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Barbara Corcoran, according to Fortune Small Business via CNN.Money.com is the self-proclaimed queen of New York real estate. Corcoran founded the Corcoran Group 35 years ago and sold it in 2001 for $66 million. To put it mildly, she is colorful. The profile reports that when sales of her business book Use What You’ve Got were disappointing she renamed the paperback version If You Don’t Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails…obviously not concerned that the males left in the industry might not look for her advice. The gist of the article is that her new ambition is to become a TV personality. Indeed, she’s a regular commentator on the Today Show on NCB where I saw her this morning.

The segment this morning was addressing the issue on everybody’s mind these days about buying and selling in a down market. There is no question that Ms. Corcoran is up to the role of providing an interesting segment on TV but there are some reasons to question some of the advice. First of all, all real estate markets are local and general advice from somebody with 35 years of experience in one of the most atypical markets in the country should be examined closely. But she is thought provoking. (more…)

One section of the Newcomers Guide to Buying Luxury Homes in Durham specifically addresses some of the technical issues that can vary from state to state. The most important of these is the concept of agency. Until a few years ago, all real estate agents technically represented the seller in a transaction, even when that agent was engaged by the buyer. The real estate commission decided that buyers deserved equal representation and formally established “buyer agency” with its own set of practices and requirements. All licensed agents are licensed to represent either buyers or sellers and under certain circumstances they can represent both in the same transaction. When an agent or broker (all licensed agents in North Carolina are now brokers) signs a listing agreement with a seller, or a buyer agent agreement with a buyer, they assume some important obligations to protect their clients’ interests. When interviewing buyer agents it is important to be careful about what information you share with them about your motivations or financial situation until you actually sign an agreement. An agent may show you homes without a buyer agent agreement in place, however, at that point the agent is technically representing the sellers and should use any information they have learned from you to get the best deal for the seller, not you. This troubles some buyers who do not want to commit to a buyers agent that they may have just met. However, most buyer agents will work with a client with a short term agreement or readily release a buyer from an agreement if some conflict develops. Per the Commission regulations, one of the first things any agent you talk to in a
“meaningful” way should do is explain these agency rules. This is not only a NCREC regulation, it makes sense and protects the buyer’s interests.

One of the first things I like to do with a new buyer client after discussing agency is review a flow diagram I put together that illustrates all the steps and different professionals that are typically involved in the home buying process. This only takes a few minutes but it makes subsequent communications much better and minimizes surprises in the process.

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 selling the community’s image for many, many years. His leadership is responsible for the “branding” effort that was discussed in a post here this week. I’ve added Bull City Mutterings to the blogroll on the left and added it to my Google Reader and encourage anyone interested in a unique perspective on Durham to do so also. As mentioned many times before, Durham’s image, or brand, has to catch up with the remarkable developments that are taking place to really ignite the luxury home market.

I began this blog a few months ago after watching the luxury market in Durham for several years. For most of that time I was a licensed agent but not actively seeking clients.  For almost two years I was helping manage another firm and my bosses wanted me to focus on that and not my own clients.   I left that firm and did a renovation of an investment property that I sold last year.  As I refocused on what it would take to market homes in the luxury segment it became clear that there was nothing wrong with the “inventory” in Durham. The real problem was the Durham “brand.” I began to feel strongly that reviving the luxury market in Durham was going to require that sellers in Durham and their agents adjust their marketing to address this directly. The Durham Luxury Home Report suggests a number of ways to do this.

As the blog started to appear in the search results for key phrases, I realized that potential buyers were going to find the site too. I needed to add some emphasis to why this is such a great place to live.  I started posting more about the things that make it desirable and made available another report for Newcomers to the Luxury Market in Durham.

The information needs of sellers are different than those of buyers.  Straddling the line between providing candid marketing advice to sellers and selling the community to buyers is difficult.  Ironically, I think it reflects one of the things I love about this community. We have a remarkable capacity for arguing out our problems in public. For the last few years, the finer neighborhoods in Durham have been one of the region’s best kept secrets. It’s time for us marketing real estate to help share with the world what is great about this community.

A friend and reader of the Durham Luxury Real Estate blog forwarded an article to me about branding in real estate. The analysis was primarily intended for large national developers but it made some points worth considering in our effort to improve the marketing of luxury properties in Durham.

This blog has taken the point of view that one of the reasons, if not the primary reason, that the luxury home market in Durham is not more vibrant, is that the Durham “brand” has not caught up with the emerging reality. This is not a unique observation. During the last couple of years the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau has headed up an effort to brand Durham as the city “Where Great Things Happen.” The group that developed this slogan and the the graphics associated with it represented a broad spectrum of community groups. As you might suspect, some compromise would be necessary to reach a consensus. Nevertheless, if promoted aggressively and adopted widely, this will improve the situation. To put some legs under it, it needs a more concrete emphasis. Just like marketing homes, the community needs to emphasize what marketers call a “unique selling proposition.” (more…)

After college and teaching for several years I decided that I wanted to try the corporate world. When I went shopping for appropriate business attire, a close family friend advised that when I bought a suit to always ask the merchant to throw in a shirt and a tie. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

By that time I had already bought my first home and between then and now I’ve owned about 15 different personal residences. Not once did I question the commission that the real estate agent got in any of those transactions. I really can’t explain why not. With that many transactions a little negotiation on a few of them might have bought a lot of shirts. But I probably wouldn’t have negotiated for shirts either if my friend hadn’t suggested it. (more…)