Spring Homes Tour

If you've just about had enough of winter, plan to visit during the New Bern Spring Homes Tour coming up the weekend of April 9th and 10th. Eighteen homes in our four historic districts will be open. In addition, many of the historic churches will be open during the tour. Tryon Palace Historic Sites are offering a discount to Spring Homes Tour ticket holders and the gardens at the Palace will be open free to the public. As if that isn't enough to make you want to come, homemade bag lunches and baked goods are available at the historic Pinnix Drug Store and the Fourteenth Annual Heritage Plant Sales will be held on the Palace grounds. There won't be enough hours in the day!

We're Off To a Good Start

I don't know about your market but, in spite of fact that many of our potential buyers are snowbound, we have noticed a healthy uptick in sales. January 's closings in our area increased by 24% over last year. February's final figures are not in yet, but 188 pending sales on the books right now bode well for the next few months. We hope that your area is also seeing an improvement.

Civil War Trolley Tours

New Bern Tours announced that starting in March it will offer a Civil War trolley tour on the third Saturday of every month. The tour will start at 10:00 am and it's a professionally-guided, hour and a half tour of New Bern with a focus on the Civil War period. If you're a Civil War buff, time your visit accordingly. For more information visit: http://www.newberntours.com/.

Blizzard of New Bern

Ok, Ok....so every few years we do get a blizzard. This one was like a fairy tale if you were a child because we went to bed Friday night with no snow and woke up Saturday morning to a whispery, winter wonderland. Quiet and lacy white. The children could hardly wait to go out a play and in a few hours there were snowmen and women all over town. You see, we have to be quick because by Sunday morning they were all gone! In fact, it was gone so fast some of the children might think it was just a dream. Actually we had about 2-3 inches and it had melted off most of the roads by mid Saturday and all of the roads by Sunday morning. Ok, so now that we've had winter, let's try Spring. Those poor daffodils were shivering under their snowy blanket.

January Sales

This is, after all, a "real estate corner" so I thought you might be interested in a bit of real estate news. As I mentioned earlier, Trent River Realty had a really good January so I am, naturally, feeling a bit bullish about the 2010 market. Just to see if my feeling was correct, I checked the January figures from our Board of Realtors. In January of 2009, 55 homes were closed. in January of 2010, 68 homes closed. That's an increase of 24%! After an incredibly good November (because of the anticipated tax credit deadline), December was slow. But then after those boom years, we have quickly forgotten that December is traditionally a slow month due to the holidays. So, it's certainly nice to see that the good news resumed in January.

You may or may not know that we are named after Bern, Switzerland and that their and our mascot is a bear. In celebration of our 300th anniversary, various groups and organizations have sponsored a bear. These whimsical bears have been placed all over town so you can go on your very own bear hunt! For more details, go to: http://www.beartownbears.org/.

New Bridge

I thought you might want to see the new bridge, under construction, opening this month. This will restore the convenient access to downtown from Highway 17 coming from the north and Highway 70 coming from the east or west. I've forgotten just how long we've done without it, but it was just a bit too long and we are all looking forward to it opening, February 26th. The building to the left with the green roof is our convention center. To the left of the bridge is the Trent River. To the right of the bridge is the Neuse River which is over a mile wide at this point. This is the famous "confluence" of the rivers often referred to in descriptions of New Bern. This lovely photo was taken by Joe Hughes.

Antique Show

Antique Show - The New Bern Preservation Foundation is holding it's annual Antique Show the weekend of February 12th. Admission for all three days is $7.50. Over 45 dealers from Maine to Florida will attend. With this being "President's Weekend", many of you may have a long weekend ahead so take the opportunity to come for a visit. More details at: www.newbernpf.org or call them at 252-633-6448.

Thanks for visiting my new blogspot! I hope you'll check back frequently. Although I do a monthly column for our downtown paper and an occasional newsletter to keep you up to date, so much is happening in New Bern this year I decided that a Blog would be more current. You do know that this is our 300th Anniversary right? Our new bridge over the Trent River will open this month. Whew! And, the pace of activity at the new History Education Center construction site has accelerated dramatically.

What you might not know is that real estate activity seems to be picking up. Trent River Realty's January was great and we're delighted. Let's hope it keeps up.

I'll be back soon with more, but I just wanted to say "Hi" and "Welcome". And yes, not to gloat, but we haven't had any snow this winter. Colder than normal, yes. A little wetter than normal, OK....but no snow. I even saw a few daffodils downtown the other day. Honest. So I'm loading up the lawnmower today to get it serviced before the grass grows.