Success Story – Private Mountain Communities, North Carolina
BY LEE PACE
The year 2007 was not a good one for start-up businesses, particularly ones tied in any respect to real estate, home building, or financial services. And 2008 is no better.
Harry Redfearn counts his blessings that his March 2007 startup has not only survived— but thrived. Private Mountain Communities is based in Asheville, North Carolina, and serves as a one-stop shopping clearinghouse for more than 200 communities in Western North Carolina. As of July 2008, the company was profitable and debt-free.
“If we had done this anywhere else but Asheville and Western North Carolina in 2007 with the real estate environment the way it is, I’m not sure it would have been successful,” says Redfearn, a partner with Dotti Smith and Bill Borg in the enterprise. “Western North Carolina has been surprisingly resilient. We have been blessed beyond expectations.”
Redfearn is a 25-year veteran of the Asheville and Western North Carolina real estate market and spent six years in sales and marketing management for The Cliffs Communities, which has developed upscale golf communities in the North Carolina mountains and the “upstate” area of South Carolina.
Private Mountain Communities has about a dozen employees in addition to the three partners. They work out of two store-front locations, one in Grove Arcade on Page Avenue in downtown Asheville and the other on Main Street in Hendersonville. Visitors can stop in, complete a questionnaire while sipping wine or cappuccino, and leave with an output of the handful of top communities that meet their interests. (The questionnaire also can be filled out online at www.privatemountaincommunities.com.) There is no charge to the home-buyer for PMC’s services; the company receives a commission from the various communities following completed sales resulting from PMC’s references.
“You have the ‘Match.com’ of everything else … we have become the ‘Match.com’ of the luxury master-planned community market,” Redfearn says. “Where we’re different is that we have a little of a ‘Consumer Reports’ element. We physically go on-site, do inspections, meet the developer, meet membership directors. Our staff has all the same knowledge that the on-site sales team has.”
David Weiss and Janet Byrne of Danville, Pennsylvania, identified Western North Carolina as a possible location for a winter or a year-round semi-retirement home. They traveled to Asheville one weekend in the spring of 2008, happened upon the PMC offices, and walked in.
They talked with an agent and were somewhat overwhelmed at the scope of real estate offerings in the region, all with different amenities, personalities, and price points. They perused a map of the area—stretching from Highlands and Cashiers in the extreme west corner of the state to Banner Elk and Blowing Rock, some 170 miles to the northeast— and completed a survey. They left with a list of four communities matching their lifestyle, time frame, and interests, and they had appointments scheduled to visit each. Two days later, they toured the Seven Falls community outside of Hendersonville and knew immediately that it was their choice.
“It was our ultimate good fortune to walk by the Private Mountain Communities office that afternoon,” Weiss says. “We may never have found this property without their expertise and would have continued searching during many visits over the next several years.”
The lynchpin to PMC’s success is a piece of proprietary software that processes a client’s questionnaire and matches it with all the communities in the region.
“Baby-boomers are so time-starved, the convenience of completing a survey in about 10 minutes and narrowing down 200 communities to the three or four they ought to look at is huge,” Redfearn says. “Some people spend three or four years researching all the communities in the marketplace and have 10 different relationships with 10 different sales people. We provide them an independent advisor who shepherds them through the process and is really on their side.”
It also helps that the company is smack in the middle of a region that has developed broad national appeal. Many of Western North Carolina’s new residents are termed “halfbacks”— they retired from the Northeast to Florida, grew weary of the summer heat, the hurricane threat, and the traffic, and moved “halfway back” to their original home and their grandchildren. Asheville has been recently ranked 26th of 200 metro areas as the “Best Places for Business and Careers” by Forbes magazine and in 2007 was tabbed “Best Southern Town” by Outside magazine.
“The area has a mild, four-season climate,” Redfearn notes. “We have a really mild winter, a very mild summer. Most folks’ favorite times of the year are spring and fall, and we have one of the longest falls of any region in U.S.”
Golf offerings in the region range from creations by Tom Fazio, who maintains an office in Hendersonville and has courses at Champion Hills, Bright’s Creek, and Wade Hampton, among others, to those designed by Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, George Cobb, Rick Robbins, and others. Tiger Woods’ first domestic design job will be located outside Asheville. But Redfearn observes that the communities thriving today are those that have expanded their offerings well beyond golf.
“Baby boomers are very health conscious and family oriented,” he says. “Wellness and the wellness lifestyle are huge. It’s no longer enough to have a great golf course. You have to have a spa for mom and outdoor activities for the kids.”
Lee Pace writes about the North Carolina golf scene from his home in Chapel Hill.
