Winner of the 2008 Rose Award for the "Best Real Estate Firm" as voted by the readers of the Chapel Hill News
News
Weaver Street Realty was featured in the Chapel Hill News, celebrating its 20th anniversary.
Realty with Attitude
For 20 years, Weaver Street Realty has stayed true to its mission to combine business with ecology.
By Eleanor Howe, Correspondent
Weaver Street Realty in Carrboro is celebrating its 20th year, still loyal to its original mission: to promote alternative land use patterns from an ecological perspective.
"Even though Weaver Street does a lot of different kinds of business and has a lot of different people involved in it, I think we still share that prospective," Gary Phillips, the founding partner, said recently. This focus is underscored by the murals of red barns, corn fields and cows that adorn the front of the building at 116 E. Main.
Kathy Buck, who started the firm with Phillips and is now a landscape architect, agrees that the company has carried over its environmental philosophy to the present.
"If you were going to look for rural land, they would be a good firm to look with. It's a niche market for them, because a lot of other firms, while they sell land, their main focus is subdivision lots," Buck said. "All firms can't do everything, and some firms do some things better than others."
Phillips estimates that over the years Weaver Street Realty has been involved in about 45 projects with permanent conservation easements or water protection strategies; in 1990 the Triangle Land Conservancy designated the firm as developers of the year.
When Weaver Street Realty began life in 1982 it was actually on Weaver Street, where the Music Emporium is now. When the classic 1910 building on Main Street that used to house the Carrboro branch of the old Chapel Hill Bank became available in 1984, Phillips recognized that the large, open space would be perfect for auctions and leased it.
Phillips persuaded Jay Parker, who was helping renovate part of Carr Mill Mall for Aurora Restaurant, to join him in the auction business. Within a few years, the real estate side of the business had moved to two small offices in the front of the building. Auctions were still held in the rear, which was empty except for rows of bleachers.
By 1987, however, the realty business had taken over the entire building and the auction functions had moved to the White Cross community west of Carrboro.
Louise Barnum, who had been working in real estate in Chatham County, came on board that year, and the next year she and Parker bought into the company and became full partners with Phillips.
Today, the realty company and the auction company are two separate businesses, with 15 people working out of the Main Street building. The auction company, though not as active now as in the firm's early days, still does 20 to 40 community benefit auctions a year, many under the gavel of Don Basnight, who's celebrating his own anniversary — his 10th with the firm — this year.
And while they no longer advertise themselves, as they did several years ago, as "the muddy boots team," Parker says they are still very much drawn to "helping people who want to use their land in a different way." For Barnum, that involves connecting people through developments based on community, like Arcadia and Solterra, two co-housing groups for which she was buyer's agent.
For Phillips, who is also chairman of the County Commissioners in Chatham, where he's running for re-election and facing a primary battle, it means finding ecological buyers interested in conservation easements.
Barnum agrees that Weaver Street is a "niche" firm, but she emphasizes that "we also do houses. We put on our muddy boots, but we'll also put on suits. Granted, some of us — myself included — may be in vintage suits, but we do it."
A good example of the company's focus is Shott's Farm, a small development off Manns Chapel Road in Chatham County. The family who owned the land was not so much interested in maximizing its economic potential as in developing a community, Parker said. Barnum, who negotiated the sale, guided the owners to set aside an existing field and pond for common use, rather than splitting it between a couple of lots, as is usually done with such amenities. The sellers also decided not to entertain offers from spec builders so the people who bought the land would be the people who lived on it. Within a month of going on the market, four fifths of the lots were sold.
"I would love to do more developments like Shott's Farm, because it was so satisfying," Barnum says. "When a piece of earth gets carved up, that's it, and I want to slow down development that doesn't have that much connection with the community."
In another recent Chatham County transaction, the company became involved in a disputed sale of 175 acres in the Rock Rest community. As a result, Phillips said, "we bought the entire property and went in and talked to people there to see what they wanted, and that was as little as possible.
"When we divided it into only four lots, our investors vanished, so we cobbled together a financing plan with the support of Rock Rest neighbors and the property owner. All four lots sold within six months. The largest is 90 acres; the smallest is 25. There are significant conservation buffers on it, and the land can never be subdivided."
Two years ago, recognizing its lengthy involvement in Chatham County and the transitions about to take place there, the company opened a satellite office in Pittsboro "as a way to serve the whole of Chatham County," Parker said, adding that the company's business isn't limited to projects with ecological value.
"We've kept a focus on serving clients, and we see ourselves as showing people more than just a new group of houses," Parker said. "We can introduce them to the community and help them, if they're interested, find a field, a retreat, some farmland, or other unusual property. We don't turn away from helping people if they're not ecologically minded — we don't have some exclusivity — but we're invested there in helping people find something more than just the newest hundred-house subdivision near Pittsboro.
"That ranges from people who want to find 100 acres to live on, to groups who want to do something different, like Blue Heron, a small group that wanted to find a large piece of land to settle on and operate cooperatively."
The approach runs counter to the current "new urbanism" trend, exemplified by Meadowmont and Southern Village, of developing dense urban cores as a way to reduce suburban sprawl and dependence on the auto. That's something they all think about, Parker says.
"But the same thing isn't for everyone," he adds. "It's great that the development going on in town is more concentrated and that places like Meadowmont and Southern Village have mixed development. But there will always be people who want to live on more ground and don't want to live in the hubbub of a dense community, and they should have those choices. What happens in the county a lot is that it gets developed to its maximum density and becomes a little suburban satellite. We try to help people find ways that are more compatible to the land."