On a typical October day, Alec Cantley is busy navigating clients through the mountains of Western North Carolina showing off the region’s impressive real estate — and even more impressive trees, which by that time are in peak color.
“The trees are all yellow and red and orange, and there’s not a cloud in the sky. I mean, it’s paradise,” the Asheville-based real estate agent said.
Unlike other parts of the country, where spring is usually the peak of the housing market, fall is Asheville’s busiest season, according to Cantley. While nearly 100,000 people call the city nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains home, it’s also a hot spot for out-of-town investors and second-home purchasers.
“Fall is a time when people really fall in love with the Blue Ridge Mountains,” he said. “You get these buyers that come up, whether it’s for vacation or they’re just coming to explore real estate. … This is where we want to be.”
This year things are different.
The leaves are still yellow, red and orange. The sky is still cloudless. But the area is reeling from Hurricane Helene, the Category 4 storm that ripped through the Southeastern United States last month leaving a wake of destruction on its path. The storm brought with it strong winds and historic flooding that destroyed dozens of businesses and damaged houses, even washing some away.
That disruption has thrown the housing market out of sorts and thrust real estate professionals into a precarious position as they juggle their careers with helping their clients, supporting their community and caring for themselves.
“There’s still clients that still need to sell homes, and there’s people that really need to buy homes now,” Cantley said. “Our job is really important, but I think there’s a tactful way to present properties and just be really sensitive to the situation and those that are really suffering.”
A new balance
It’s a balance local real estate professionals are trying to master, especially as the market starts moving again and they prepare for the storm's further effects.
Data from Homes.com showed that home sales in the two weeks before the hurricane were outpacing sales from the comparable period a year earlier. But since then, there’s been a steep drop-off. In the first week of October, there was only one home sale this year. That’s compared to 38 sales for the same time in 2023.
There’s also been a decrease in newly listed homes. This year, following the hurricane, the first three weeks of October saw a total of 56 homes listed for sale. Last year, there were 55 properties listed in the first week of the month alone.
Some real estate agents have started to feel out what’s left of the housing market and leverage their knowledge and expertise to help local homeowners, according to Rachel Stark, a broker with Patton Allen Real Estate.
“We want to come from a place of service and not from a place of taking advantage,” she said.
But that’s brought new fears to the surface, including worries that investors will soon enter the market to buy up properties for cheap.
Historically, as homeowners grapple with weather or disaster-damaged property, out-of-market investors have targeted those facing financial hardship or who are in vulnerable situations offering to buy their house. While it can be a seemingly easy cash grab, investor offers can be lowballs that cost homeowners part of their equity.
Last year, for example, after a wildfire swept through Maui, Hawaii, there was such a great demand from investors looking to buy fire-damaged properties that the state’s government took steps to prohibit and limit such purchases.
In Asheville, it’s something that’s started to happen at some brokerages, and agents expect it will become more common in the coming weeks and months. For Amanda Cleveland, a real estate agent at Asheville Realty Group, calls from those buyers started just days after the storm. Though her team of more than 45 people typically works with “a lot of investors” in the mountain region, they are taking more calls than usual from those buyers a month after the storm.
Abby Holmes, an agent with Keller Williams, said she thinks those requests are only going to increase now that utilities are coming back.
“It’ll probably start happening now that we have water ... because usually they wait for infrastructure to come back,” she said.
Potential relief
That anticipated shift is further complicating real estate agents’ role in the region’s recovery.
On the one hand, investors could be looking to take advantage of “desperate” residents facing financial hardship.
Some homeowners are “not going to get insurance money. They may not get FEMA money, and they're just going to take, you know, terrible offers and get out,” according to Stark. “I would never discourage anyone from talking to an investor, but make sure you're getting what your property is worth.”
But at the same time, investors could be more willing to purchase a damaged property and take on the cost of repair. That could create some movement in the lagging housing market.
Part of the recent slowdown has been driven by listings taken off the market temporarily as homeowners wait for things to settle down, according to Cantley. And some properties listed for sale were damaged in the storm.
For example, one of Cantley’s listings was struck by several trees and needed a new roof and gutters. The sellers have been able to get their insurance claim and complete those repairs, and they closed with their buyers on Oct. 25.
It's not always that easy though, Cantley said. One of the agent's listings in the Biltmore Forest neighborhood was hit by 12 downed trees, he said. That property has since been taken off the market.
“Now the conversation is basically, do we rebuild it?” he said. “It needs a whole new roof, and then there’s some structural repairs. So the question is: Do we sell it as-is and kind of take money off equal to the insurance, or do we go ahead and fix it and 12 to 18 months from now we list it?”
In those instances, an in-market investor willing to take on a damaged property could be helpful not only to home sellers, but to the Asheville housing market at large. If a seller can get a “fair amount” for their property, even if it’s at a discount, it could be worth offloading the risk of repairing the property, he said.
And those kinds of sales are already helping the Asheville real estate market pick up speed again, according to Cleveland of Asheville Realty Group. The brokerage had a listing in need of a cash buyer. It took just one day for an investor to purchase the property, she said.
Fear of change
There are also concerns that those investors buying properties could “change the landscape of Asheville,” Stark said.
Asheville is known for its eclectic character. The city is rife with artists and creatives, and locals said many of those people rely on gig work. It’s an environment that’s organically cultivated a unique sense of community, they said.
That fear is manifesting especially in the The River Arts District, for example, a part of the city filled with artist galleries and other small businesses. Over the past 40-plus years, the neighborhood near the French Broad River has become a hub for visual artists and artisans. And until Hurricane Helene hit, its main throughway, Depot Street, was lined with colorful buildings, many housing dozens of artists displaying their painted canvases, handcrafted jewelry, towering sculptures and more.
Visiting Depot Street now is like a game of hopscotch in a dust storm, navigating piles of debris and destroyed pieces of art coated in mud. During the storm, the river rose and surged into the neighborhood, leaving behind only the bare bones of some buildings and ravaging the insides of others.
Local real estate professionals and business owners are now worried about preserving its traditions and preventing outsiders from changing the city’s makeup.
“If some big company comes in there … then they're going to build it out in a way that's not what it used to be,” Stark said. “I think that's the big fear people have, that they want to keep Asheville, Asheville.”