The first category consists of everyone from singles tired of throwing their rent money down the drain to newlyweds to folks whose growing families are making that apartment especially cramped.
Upgraders typically have more than one child and have worked their way up the career ladder far enough to be drawing a higher paycheck – perfect time to move on from their starter home and find a place with a bonus room and a big backyard.
Then there are the empty nesters looking to leave their suddenly quiet single-family homes for something smaller, yet perhaps even more luxurious.
Do any of those describe you? Good news.
Real estate experts say the Durham housing market has plenty to offer homebuyers in any of those three categories.
“The wonderful thing about Durham is how many different niches we have,” says Susan Richter, a Realtor with Prudential Carolinas.
“The variety of housing options is fantastic and still, for the most part, affordable. If you say, ‘This is my price range, and this is what I want in terms of amenities,’ you can find it in Durham. It almost doesn’t matter what you say.”
The not-so-good news is that there’s so much inventory and such a variety of housing styles and neighborhood amenities that narrowing your search could be a tough task.
Durham Magazine asked Realtors to help with the latter problem.
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Durham is a transient community, with people constantly moving in, moving out and moving up. Grad students graduate and need to get out of that townhouse when they get a gig, either here or elsewhere. Doctors retire and head to the beach, leaving their 4,000-square-foot houses behind. Northerners move down for tech jobs but want to keep a slice of the urban lifestyle they came to love.
All of this is great news for homebuyers.
“There are some good values to be had right now in virtually every neighborhood, because there is always a segment of sellers who need to be on their way for whatever reason,” says Realtor Amy Andorfer of The Andorfer Group.
The market has slowed, both Amy and her husband and business partner, Jay, say, though not anywhere to the extent of the housing market busts seen elsewhere.
That’s also great news for buyers, in that sellers who really need to take that job in Silicon Valley aren’t getting as many offers on their homes as they were a few years ago.
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