Communities
Trouble for the “exurbs”?
Living the rural lifestyle The Chapel Hill area of the Triangle includes some wonderful rural communities that have been extremely popular over the last 30 years or so as homeowners seeking a more rural lifestyle traveled 20-30 minutes outside of the Triangle where they could own some acreage and settle into country life. Because the [...]
Raleigh is #2 city for wedded bliss!
In a survey by Rent.com to determine the best cities for newlyweds, Raleigh took one of the top scores. The folks at Rent.com surveyed not only couples’ attitudes but also looked at the unemployment rates and mean income levels of each city. Young professionals and new families are drawn to Raleigh for its affordability, friendliness, [...]
Have we turned the corner? Chapel Hill area real estate, 2012 edition
Multiple offers for the first time in years We have thirteen listings right now ranging in price from $179,000 to $1.3 million, in Chapel Hill, Durham and Chatham County which gives us a pretty good sense of where the market is going. Over the past few weeks we have had three in-town Chapel Hill listings [...]
Carrboro CVS is occupied, closes up parking lot
It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for the Occupy people. I spent a good deal of my college career in sit-ins and various student protests. But in those days we were protesting a war that was killing hundreds of thousands of people. The little town of Carrboro is famously liberal, having had one of the [...]
Raleigh/Cary makes the list of the top 10 real estate markets to watch in 2012
Inman News, one of the premier news sites for the real estate industry, has published its list of the Top Ten markets to watch in 2012, and “Raleigh/Cary” is #1. Evidently in 2003 the Office of Management and Budget redefined the Federal Statistical Areas and dismantled what had been for decades the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, MSA [...]
A new research park in Chatham County
Chatham residents have known for some time that the Preston Development Group was buying up land between Pittsboro and Cary south of Highway 64, but it was widely speculated that this land was being acquired for a housing development. As it turns out the developers have something much bigger in mind: a new research park [...]
Property tax values versus sales prices
North Carolina law requires that counties reassess property values for tax purposes at least every eight years, but until recently the rapidly increasing home values led to more frequent revaluations. Durham and Wake County reassessed values in 2007 (effective 2008) which was at the peak of the market, and Chatham and Orange reassessed in 2008 [...]
Wake County school reassignment plan and the housing market
Wake County includes Raleigh and Cary along with the surrounding bedroom communities of Wake Forest, Garner, Clayton, Fuquay-Varina (yes, that IS its real name), Holly Springs, and Apex plus a few others. It’s the largest school system in the state, and it continues to grow along with the population of Raleigh and Wake County. Over [...]
Chatham County Studio Tour
Every year artists in Orange and Chatham Counties open up their studios to the public. It’s a wonderful way to meet the local artists and to see how they work, and it’s also a great opportunity to tour the local countryside and enjoy refreshments and make new friends. We missed the Orange County studio tour [...]
Business Week thinks Raleigh is the #1 Best City
Photo by Amy Jones. In the competition for lifestyle that is the Triangle collective of communities, Raleigh has always thought it was #1 so this will come as no surprise to them! Ask most people which city they would most want to live in and usually their answers would be shaped by such realities as [...]
