In March I sat in a half-empty Raleigh office with Marcus and we put together a contingency plan for what we thought was going to be a brutal year. Twelve-month cash reserves. Tightened underwriting. A list of seller scenarios we expected to see by summer.

By December I’m closing more deals than any month in my career. The Triangle didn’t crash. It boomed. Some of that contingency plan never came out of the drawer.

This is my honest look back at 2020 from the acquisitions side. What surprised me. Where I was wrong. What the actual market in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, and Apex did this year, with the numbers I have from our deal flow.

Why didn’t the Triangle housing market crash in 2020?

Three forces stopped the expected crash. Federal forbearance under the CARES Act absorbed almost all immediate financial distress, mortgage rates hit historic lows that pulled buyers in, and out-of-state migration into Raleigh and Durham accelerated dramatically once remote work normalized. Prices ran 8 to 10 percent higher year over year in Wake County. The 30-year rate trajectory is tracked at the FRED MORTGAGE30US series.

What I Got Wrong in March

I thought we’d see a wave of distressed sellers by summer. We didn’t. The CARES Act forbearance program absorbed almost all of the immediate financial distress. Federal foreclosure moratoriums on agency mortgages froze the pipeline. Servicers offered deferral options that pushed missed payments to the end of the loan. The cliff didn’t materialize.

I thought retail demand would dry up. It dried up for about six weeks in March and April, and then came back harder than 2019. Mortgage rates fell to historic lows (sub-3 percent on 30-year conventional by late summer), and that pulled buyers into the market who had been waiting on the sidelines for years. By June, decent properties in Cameron Village and Five Points were getting multiple offers within 48 hours of listing.

I thought Triangle prices would be flat or down 5 percent. They went up. Wake County average sale price climbed roughly 8 to 10 percent year over year by my read of the data, and individual neighborhoods did much more than that. North Hills, Trinity Park, Hope Valley, Cameron Village: all showed double-digit appreciation in 12 months.

The lesson from being wrong: macroeconomic predictions don’t always show up in housing markets the way you expect. Local supply, local demand, and local migration patterns can override what should be obvious headwinds.

The Migration Story Was the Story

The biggest surprise of 2020 in the Triangle was the people moving here.

We saw it in our deal flow. Buyers (both retail buyers competing against us and the end-buyers we resold to) were increasingly coming from outside North Carolina. New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts. RTP and remote work made Raleigh and Durham attractive in a way they had been gradually for years and then suddenly all at once during 2020.

A property in Trinity Park I had under contract for $310,000 in May resold in October to a couple from Brooklyn who paid $385,000 cash without ever seeing it in person. They had bought a house sight unseen because they couldn’t get on a flight, were tired of their apartment, and had been priced out of the New York market for years. The math worked for them at $385k. It would have worked at $400k.

Multiply that by hundreds of out-of-state buyers, layered on top of normal Triangle demand from the local economy, and the inventory crunch we ended the year with makes sense. There just weren’t enough houses. Anyone who wanted to sell could sell. Sellers who would have struggled in a normal year (distressed properties, weird floor plans, unloved zip codes) found buyers easily.

Triangle Submarkets, City by City

A quick read on each Triangle market based on what I actually closed and saw this year.

Raleigh. The strongest of the bunch. Inside-the-Beltline neighborhoods (Five Points, Hayes Barton, Cameron Village) hit prices I would have called impossible in 2019. Multiple offers on essentially everything that didn’t have catastrophic problems. North Raleigh held up well too. Brier Creek and the western edge moved fast on anything decent. We closed 23 cash deals in Wake County this year, our biggest year in the county since I started.

Durham. Trinity Park and Old North Durham were red-hot all year, even with the Duke campus closed for half of it. The 9th Street corridor and Watts–Hillandale benefited from out-of-state buyers who liked the walkability. Hope Valley, traditionally slower because of larger lots and older homes that need updating, also saw real demand from move-up Triangle buyers. We closed 14 Durham deals this year.

Cary. Cary was steadier: less spike, less drama, but consistent appreciation. Preston, MacGregor Downs, Lochmere all moved at typical Cary speed. The newer western Cary developments around Carpenter Village did particularly well because of school zoning and proximity to RTP. Cary’s higher price point ($580k median) limited some buyers but didn’t soften the market. 8 deals.

Chapel Hill. UNC’s enrollment pattern and Franklin Street’s quieter year didn’t hurt the housing market. Southern Village and Meadowmont stayed strong. Briarcliff and Westwood saw real demand from medical professionals at UNC Health. Limited inventory throughout. 4 deals: small market for us, but every one of them closed at numbers above our 2019 expectations.

Apex. The Apex story this year was families fleeing density. People who had been in Raleigh apartments or smaller close-in homes moved out to Bella Casa, Salem Village, Scotts Mill for more space and a yard. New construction couldn’t keep up. Resale values jumped. 6 deals.

The Sellers Who Called Us

A breakdown of who was actually calling Sell NC Fast in 2020 in the Triangle:

Inherited property was the largest category, by a wide margin. Older homeowners passed during the spring wave or earlier in 2020, the families couldn’t get back to NC quickly because of travel restrictions, and properties sat. By summer the heirs were ready to sell, often remotely, and didn’t want to deal with cleaning out and listing. We closed multiple inherited deals this year on properties in Trinity Park, Five Points, and Hope Valley where the executors signed entirely from out of state.

Tired landlords were the second-largest. The eviction freeze made portfolio cleanup urgent for landlords who were already on the edge. Several Triangle landlords with three to six rentals each sold one or two to us specifically to reduce exposure to non-paying tenants while still keeping their better-performing properties.

Relocation was bigger than usual. People taking remote-first jobs in different cities, people whose spouse had to relocate for medical reasons, military families with delayed PCS orders that finally went through. We closed several relocation deals where the seller never came back to the Triangle to sign anything.

Pre-foreclosure was actually smaller than 2019, despite the underlying economic stress. The forbearance shield kept most homeowners out of the formal pipeline. The pre-foreclosure deals we did close were almost entirely on non-agency loans: private mortgages, portfolio loans from smaller banks, contracts for deed.

What Pricing Looked Like

This is the part I want to be honest about. Cash offer pricing tracked retail. As retail moved up, our offers moved up. The spread between cash and listing didn’t expand or contract dramatically.

For a typical 1,500 sq ft Triangle home in fair condition (some deferred maintenance, no major issues):

  • January 2020 cash offer range: 78 to 84 percent of fair market value
  • December 2020 cash offer range: 80 to 86 percent of fair market value

A few percentage points doesn’t sound like much. On a $350,000 Triangle home it’s $7,000 to $14,000 in additional seller proceeds compared to where we’d have been at the start of the year. On a portfolio of multiple properties (a tired-landlord exit on three rentals), that’s real money.

The spread tightened because investor competition was real. There are more cash buyers chasing fewer deals in the Triangle than there were a year ago. Sellers have options. We respond by paying closer to retail to win the deals worth winning.

What Surprised Me Operationally

Three things on the operations side that I didn’t expect to be permanent changes.

Remote signing actually works. Senate Bill 704 enabled remote online notarization in May, and by year-end we’d done dozens of fully remote closings. The process is slightly slower than in-person (overnight courier on document originals), but the seller convenience has been transformative. Out-of-state heirs no longer have to fly to NC to close. I expect remote signing to remain a permanent option even if NC reverts to default in-person rules after the emergency ends.

Video walkthroughs are now standard. We still do in-person walkthroughs whenever the seller is local and comfortable, but the FaceTime / WhatsApp walkthrough has become a fully acceptable workflow. We’ve eliminated some of the back-and-forth that used to delay offers.

Title turn times are faster. The closing attorneys we work with in Wake, Durham, and Orange counties got really efficient at remote workflows during 2020. Files that used to take 8 to 10 business days now consistently close in 5 to 7. That makes 10-day cash closings genuinely common rather than aspirational.

What I Think Happens in 2021

I’m going to keep this prediction tight because the world keeps making fools of confident predictors.

Inventory will stay tight through at least mid-2021. Rates will remain low. Prices will keep climbing in the Triangle, though the rate of climb will probably moderate from the late-2020 sprint. The forbearance reckoning that didn’t happen in 2020 may show up in spring 2021 as deferred payments come due in some form, but I don’t think it will be a flood.

Cash buyers will stay competitive on pricing. The investor field has not thinned. If anything, more capital is rotating into the Triangle from coastal funds. Sellers should expect competitive offers.

The biggest 2021 risk for sellers: waiting for a better market that may not materialize, while carrying costs and life changes pile up. The biggest 2021 opportunity: selling into a market that has more demand than supply, with reasonable cash exits on properties that wouldn’t have had clean exits in normal times.

If You’re Thinking About 2021

If you have a Triangle property in Wake, Durham, Orange, or Chatham and you’ve been weighing a sale into 2021, the math right now is favorable. Pricing is up, demand is real, our offers are higher than they would have been a year ago, and the closing process is faster than it has ever been.

Call me at (845) 316-1119 or reach out through our contact form. I take Triangle deals personally. I drive the property myself or hop on the video walkthrough, run comps the same day, and have a real number for you within 24 hours. If the math works, we close in 10 to 14 days. If it doesn’t, I’ll tell you that too.

2020 wasn’t the year I thought it would be. I’d rather close out a strong year than a year where I was right.