Pittsboro Real Eric Andrews has seen many people moving from Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as other parts of California to North Carolina including Chatham County.
Eric says he takes calls all the time from people moving from Raliegh, Charlotte, Cary, Durham and Chapel Hill wanting to come to the Pittsboro area only to find out they had moved to NC already from CA and were looking to move further into the country.
Second Time’s a Charm
Eric says that the recently researched the demographic of those people moving into Chatham County, and found that they were from the following places:
- Wake County NC
- Orange County, NC
- Mecklenburg, County, NC
- Orange County, CA
Eric had to do a doubletake seeing Orange County listed twice, but the second Orange County was the county just south of the Los Angeles Metro area. After studying these lists, it appears that many people are coming from Orange County CA, straight to Chatham County while many others are moving first to other parts of NC and then moving to Pittsboro and surrounding communities in Chatham County.
Real Estate Dollar Stretches Further
People moving from California are astounded by what they can get for the same money. A 1200 square foot ranch house in some parts can be $800k to $1 million, and the same property over here costs considerably less.
Eric says that these people don’t want to sell their $1 million house in LA and then come buy a $1 million dollar house here. Rather they want something cheaper, and they realize they can get a much larger house for less than half of what they were paying.
Quality of Life
The people Eric has talked to tells him that money isn’t the only reason that they like North Carolina. Some of the things they point to are:
- Everything greener here. CA has a lot of brown.
- Not just real estate, but prices of everything is lower
- Commute times are much lower here, so people with a job near Raliegh, Apex or Cary don’t mind commuting 45 minutes or an hour.
- Political Issues making life difficult for some. High taxes, individual liberties like you can’t use a plastic stray, etc.
- In SF, Commut times even worse, and 900 sq-foot apartment might be $1 million.
There are some things that they don’t like:
- Public Transportation is non-existent here,
- Freeways and roads not the best
Why the Second Move?
When Eric talks to people who want to move to Chatham County as a second move from California, he tells them that the biggest difference is the price of land. Eric tells them a 2 x 4 costs the same in Wake as it does in Chatham, but land is much cheaper here.
For roughly the same money, .25 acres in Cary—which is considered a big plot—will get you 2 acres near Pittsboro and is considered a small piece of land.
