North Carolina has good home prices but low inventory — even when you can afford to compete
When Kamala Subramaniam graduated from N.C. State University with a doctorate in computer engineering in 2006, there weren’t many opportunities that could have made her stay in the Triangle.
Her dream company, from the time she left India for Raleigh, had been Nortel, a networking equipment company that once employed more than 1,000 people in Research Triangle Park. But by then, the telecom company was in a tailspin and was laying off rather than hiring.
So Subramaniam looked west to California and began a career that saw her working at startups and some of the world’s largest tech firms.
Now, 15 years later, she has returned to the Triangle to run Google’s new Durham cloud engineering office, which will one day be home to more than 1,000 employees. It’s a major bet by the search giant that the Triangle can become one of the country’s leading tech hubs.
“When Google looks to open up a new site, they’re looking at a bunch of things: What is the talent in that area? What are the growth opportunities?” Subramaniam, 44, said over a video chat. “The talent here is great, and we’ve hired really well across all levels, and, across all diverse populations. That is really showing us that we’ve made a great bet.”
But, personally, one of the big selling points for returning to the Triangle is that she wanted her husband and two young children to experience a potentially better quality of living than they were getting in California’s Bay Area.
Before she and her husband, who also has an engineering background, made the decision to take the Durham job, they got out a piece of paper and jotted down all of their questions. Would the Triangle have enough job growth in engineering going forward? She thought yes. Would it offer enough diversity of people? Again, she thought yes.
But what jumped out to her was what she viewed, simply, as an easier way of living. “The resources per person is very high in North Carolina compared to California,” she said.
In the Bay Area, she said, you had to put your child on a wait list for child care before you were even pregnant. Every time she would try to enroll her kids into an activity like swimming or gymnastics, “it was a fight,” she said. “They put you on a wait list and you have to come back in six months.”
In Durham, she was able to find an opening at a Durham gymnastics center as soon as they moved to the area earlier this year.
“Life is easier. People are so friendly, and you’re getting the engineering opportunities to go with it,” Subramaniam said. “So, it became really a no-brainer.”
Finding housing, however, did not turn out to be as easy as she had assumed.
“It’s not crazy in terms of prices,” she noted.
For the price of a Bay Area home, in the Triangle you can buy a much larger home that would widen the eyes of the average California resident. That was an attractive quality for Subramaniam after having spent 18 months forced to work at home with both her husband and children.
But the inventory here remains low.
Hundreds of thousands of people have moved to the Triangle over the past few years — Wake County alone grew from about 901,000 people in 2010 to more than 1.1 million in 2020, according to census figures. And that has created fierce competition for the area’s housing stock along with current residents looking for a bigger home or hoping to no longer rent.
Subramaniam was outbid on homes three times in Durham. Durham was so competitive, she said, that she ended up buying in Chapel Hill. But still, the spacious five-bedroom house she bought dwarfs anything that would be comparable in price around Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.
In September, according to Triangle Multiple Listing Services data, there were only 404 homes for sale in Durham County, a 31.2% drop from a year prior.
“In the Bay Area, if you lose a bid, you can always find another property in a similar area and similar conditions,” she said. “But the inventory here is pretty low.”
In the meantime, Subramaniam can’t wait until Google gives employees the green light to go to the new Durham office. “I’ve been locked up for the past year and a half, you know, with my two kids,” she said.
She also desperately misses all of the office amenities that Google used to provide workers, like free breakfast and lunch.
“I have to fend for myself now after many, many years of (free) breakfast and food,” she said.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate.
