Durham County Real Estate Market Still Lagging

Despite several months of good news about the economy, the Triangle real estate market continues to lag, with both prices and sales of homes falling. To the extent there is any silver lining in this, it is that the Durham County is doing less poorly than either Orange or Wake countries insofar as the percentage of decreases is concerned. Triangle MLS, Inc., a local real-estate tracking firm, has excellent summaries of the state of the market, broken down by county and month on their website.

The depressing news is encapsulated well by the graph below.

But no all is lost! When looking at some long-term trends, the folks at Trulia Insight, a data-crunching arm of the real-estate powerhouse, came up with this fascinating infographic of people who are searching for housing across state lines. There are some interesting findings in this dataset when looking at Durham county, and the Triangle region more generally.



For instance, the inbound searches (i.e. people outside the Triangle looking for houses here) show that large inflows of searches come from New York and Washington DC. In fact, searches coming from those markets are greater than Atlanta and equal to Charlotte and Fayetteville.

Conversely, outbound searches of housing (i.e. people in the Triangle looking elsewhere,are looking at Wilmington, Charlotte, and Atlanta in about equal proportion, with far fewer inquires into the northeast.

Overall, it looks like more people are trying to move into the Triangle than people from the Triangle seeking to  move elsewhere in the country.