You have $300,000. Here are the homes you can afford in West Asheville.

Dillon Davis | The Citizen-Times

Show Caption Hide Caption West Asheville real estate Kyle Henry and Aaron Palmer, partners in Ground Floor Properties NC, have a nearly finished duplex on State Street. Each 1,100-square-foot unit is selling for $279,000.

ASHEVILLE — You might not know Jonathan Coss and Amy Trujillo. But if you've searched for a home in West Asheville in the past few years, you probably know their story.

"Our real estate agent sat down with us and said, 'OK, let's focus on what you want,'" said Coss, a retired Navy veteran, from the porch of he and Trujillo's Michigan Avenue home. The couple scoured the area for parts of two years in pursuit of the right property, often focusing much of their attention on West Asheville.

They wanted to put down roots in a walkable neighborhood — preferably a short jaunt to a breakfast food haven like Sunny Point Café, if they so desire — and they wanted to know their neighbors, two features for which West Asheville is known well.

However, they found their roughly $300,000 budget often placed them in a race against time — and other buyers.

"A lot of houses we looked at were all over $300,000, but a lot of them needed work," Coss said. "When the price started dropping like below $300,000 — and that was the magic number — (we knew) some of them might be a bidding war."

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That's the way things tend to go in West Asheville, local real estate brokers say. Thus far in 2018, 356 homes have been sold in the 28806 ZIP code, comprising much of the Haywood Road corridor and its surrounding neighborhoods. Last year, that number was 634, placing it near the top of homes sold in Buncombe County ZIP codes, Mike Figura, owner of Mosaic Community Lifestyle Realty, said.

The average price of West Asheville homes sold this year is $294,526, up about 7.5 percent from last year's total, Figura said. For reference, both Asheville and Buncombe County set records for median sale prices in the second quarter this year with median sale prices of $325,000 and $290,000, respectively, a Mosiac analysis shows.

What makes West Asheville competitive, Figura said, are the prices seen in its housing stock, a majority of which is composed of smaller homes built before 1990, and, in many cases, before 1950.

Mark Lavin, a real estate broker with Carolina Mountain Sales, said there were about 75 homes in West Asheville on the market in August, which he notes seems like a lot, "but it really isn’t for the housing demand we have right now."

Most homes that hit the market are under contract in about 10 days, while many are gone in less than three, he said.

His best advice for prospective buyers in the area? Be aggressive.

"You have to be extremely aggressive," Lavin said. "The buyers have to know going into it, if they find something they like, they have to act immediately.

"If they do the 'let me think about it over the weekend,' it’s going to be under contract."

What will $300,000 get you?

A tight market creates pressure for buyers. In some cases, that pressure leads to heartbreak.

That was the case for area resident Laura Davis and her partner, Melissa McMinn. In their home search, Davis said they wanted a minimum of two bedrooms, a decent sized yard and "the closer to Haywood Road, the better." But they found a $200,000 budget made it challenging to plant their flag in West Asheville, particularly as many others are trying to do the same.

In one instance, they lost out on a home while they still were on a walkthrough of it.

"It was on the market for maybe three hours," Davis said, adding that if you aren't prepared to make a decision almost immediately, "it puts a lot of pressure on you." (Of note, she and Melissa expect to close on a home in the area sometime next week.)

Still, most homes that hit the market see some sort of buying frenzy, said Carrie-Welles Craven, a real estate broker at Mosiac. Craven, who also lives in West Asheville near Coss and Trujillo, said she purchased her two-bedroom, one-bathroom home in 2006 for about $135,000. With improvements made to the property and the way the market has grown in recent years, she said the home would sell for $250,000 today.

She considers herself somewhat lucky, as she nabbed the house before it hit the open market.

Craven said she was drawn to the area due to its mix of "grit and growing businesses," a trend that has continued these past dozen years, even through the 2008 housing market crash.

"It was up-and-coming," she said. "I could be in town and be a part of a neighborhood that was clearly going to become what is really the only walking neighborhood in Asheville. I saw the Haywood corridor as future businesses that would make up a fun community to be a part of."

These days, Craven considers $300,000 as the market for homes in the western part of the city. At that price, she says, a buyer generally can expect a close-to-finished two-bedroom, one-bathroom house. Below $300,000 also yields options, though she acknowledges that price range lends itself to renovation projects to some of the area's nearly century-old bungalows.

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"If you’re looking under $300,000 in West Asheville, you’re hoping to find two bathrooms if you can," she said. "You're hoping for more than 800 square feet if you can, but it's more about what you're able to get in a competing market."

For some, West Asheville offers a significant investment opportunity, as the housing market continues to roar. Resident Crom Carey bought his first house in West Asheville during the summer of 2016.

Within six months, he'd decided to purchase two more.

"That was terrifying to go from zero debt to half a million of debt in six months," he said, laughing.

Carey, 30, works a day job as shipping manager at Fletcher-based BIG Adventures, a manufacturer of Liquidlogic kayaks. On the side, he runs Cromwell Properties LLC, which he started with some family inheritance money. He now owns five homes — all of which were acquired before they hit the market in the low $200,000 range — and he leases several of them to tenants.

Put simply, Carey relishes opportunities presented to him in West Asheville. He said the area has all the advantages of the city's downtown area, but without a heavy tourist presence — though, he expects that to change.

"The direction Asheville is going to grow as far as tourism is it’s going to overflow into West Asheville, and everybody who was in West Asheville is going to Woodfin," he said.

Carey suggests prospective buyers in the neighborhood work their network to find a home before it hits the market. He also said he believes West Asheville offers buyers a firm investment to go along with a charming neighborhood.

It's an experience, he argues, that one might not find in Leicester, for example.

"It’s the best investment you can make," he said. "People are not going to want to stop living in West Asheville."

But is it recession proof?

All in all, Coss and Trujillo will have invested about $80,000 in updating their house, likely the most significant face-lift it has seen since it was built in the mid-1920s. It places their final cost of living there just north of $300,000, the top end of their budget.

Trujillo, also a Navy veteran who works as a wellness coach, said it's becoming common for people to snap up older homes in the neighborhood to modernize them, as they did.

But she acknowledges their search was not without its hiccups.

"We got our heart broken half a dozen times," she said. "It just didn't work out and it fell through for some reason. Either somebody got a contract before us or (the seller) picks someone else."

"Someone comes in and they throw $30,000 over the asking price and they're going to pay cash — something like that," Coss added.

However, local real estate experts agree that housing investments in West Asheville are sure to be winning ones for buyers. That's expected to be the case even as economists predict the country's next recession to show up by 2020 or 2021.

"If anything, it will kind of hit a bar and stay there for a while, and that’s what happened last time," Craven said. "I never lost value. I held steady for a while, and I think that will stay steady. Higher-end market will see more of an adjustment but $300,000 and under are going to be stable if it’s a recession."

Craven said it's the area's "charm and character" that likely keep the neighborhood buzzing for investors, even if the next economic downtown looks anything like the last. Adding to that, Lavin argues other communities such as North Asheville and the central part of the city also held their own water in light of the last recession, and could again.

Lavin expects a similar outcome this time around, given the sustained popularity of its neighborhoods and business district. It's a trendy place to be, he said.

"It seemed West Asheville still had some lower-priced homes right after, say, 2008 so when we came out of the recession, that’s where people tended to jump to," he said. "You could still get a house that was affordable and it was in a nice, walkable community.

"That seemed to be appealing to a lot of folks, especially younger folks."



