Jay Zenner

One thing that happens in a university town, especially a university town with a medical center, is that there are a lot of people that move here but only expect to stay for two or three years while they are doing a residency or grad school. This special situation tailors the advice and guidance in home buying I provide these usually younger buyers, who are often also first time buyers.

The thing I believe they should be most careful about is purchasing a home that will have enough appreciation to at least cover sales expenses when they put the house on the market two or three years later. In purely financial terms, it might be a close call on whether many of these folks should be buying instead of renting. However, because there is more selection of homes for sale and, for doctors especially, financial institutions are willing to lend them money, many choose to buy instead of rent.

Hope Valley Farms is one of the most popular Durham neighborhoods and one I often recommend to these short-time citizens. Hope Valley Farms is situated in southern Durham so that it is convenient to both Duke University and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, both major research universities with medical centers and medical schools.

Besides the convenience of being close to both universities and a major regional shopping center (SouthPoint) the primary reason Hope Valley Farms works for this segment of the market is it's good resale history. But there are a number of other factors too. First, it has homes in a wide variety of price ranges including townhomes. The style of the homes is fairly consistent...some might say bland...but that is one reason that it consistently sells well...it's a well, researched subdivision, that truthfully doesn't look much different than a hundred other similar communities in the southeast. But that is not a bad thing if you are not going to be here long. Since the neighborhoods in HVF are newer, the homes tend to be in a little more up to date and often better condition than the slightly older and larger Woodcroft, just south of HVF. Schools are good, especially the elementary schools.

One of the things I realized while doing the labels for a mailing in HVF was what an international community it had become. Many, many of the names I encountered were definitely of an origin outside of this country with lots of Asian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic and European names. This reflects both the draw of the universities as well as the high tech companies in the Research Triangle Park.

For that last couple of year I have kept market statistics on Hope Valley Farms. As I write this I have not posted the last quarter of 2007. Check my blog site bullcitybulletin.com for more information.

There's an old cliche in advertising that advises "sell the sizzle not the steak" or emphasize benefits over features. In spite of this most of the advertising of homes for sale emphasizes square feet, lot size, number of rooms, and other features...not benefits. This is really just a lingering habit from a boom market.

As the market shifts from one dominated by sellers to one dominated by buyers the best agents will begin applying more sophisticated marketing techniques to make their listings competitive. One way to begin shifting this perspective is to empathize more with the buyer's situation. A potential buyer moving to the Triangle region not only has somewere between 16,000 to 18,000 choices in the Triangle Multiple Listing Service, but he or she also has several distinct communities to choose from. Sometimes circumstances...like the location of a job...determine which of those communities will be selected. But sometimes any of the points in the Triangle might be just fine and life style choices can play a major role in the selection of a community.

I've lived in Durham since 1984 and work primarily in Durham. It's my favorite community in the Triangle. Chapel Hill has it's charm and Raleigh is lively and provides a lot of housing choices but to me Durham is special. But Durham has long had an image problem. One of my earliest impressions of Durham came near my office in Downtown Durham in the Central Carolina Bank building which dominated the skyline at the time. I saw a fox running down Chapel Hill Street past boarded up abandoned retail space. It suggested that nature was taking over again and that the decay was irreversible. It was certainly quite a contrast with downtown Richmond where I had just come from another bank to be CCB's marketing director.

Things have changed quite a bit in the 23 years that have past but the image has not caught up. And then there are setbacks like the so-called "lacrosse scandel" that got worldwide attention and characterized the town as racially divided and mis-governed.

The real estate agents in Wake County and Raleigh outnumber those in Durham by 7 or 8 to 1. Many of them know little about Durham and are reluctant to take clients to Durham. The purpose of this blog is two fold. The first is to provide some information about Durham and it's neighborhoods to those agents in Raleigh that wouldn't mind showing homes in Durham if they knew more about it and there were neighborhoods and homes that would meet their buyer clients' needs. The second reason for this blog is to provide potential buyers with the same information directly.

Durham has a texture and rhythm that is unique and it would be a shame to overlook it. I hope other Durham agents will join me in talking about the community and begin to see it and describe it as a benefit rather than an incidental feature of one of their listings.