Even after Apple delays project, demand, prices for Wake County homes remains high

Data from Triangle MLS shows that sky-high demand for real estate in Cary, Apex and Morrisville is fueling stubbornly-high home prices, even after Apple's announcement in June that their plans for an RTP campus would be delayed by 4 years.

Data for June 2024 showed a tick-up in the median home sale price for Cary, Apex and Morrisville combined, up to $720,000. The month before the Apple Campus announcement was first made in 2021 , the median sale price for the three towns was $470,000.

"We're seeing the market continue to grow," said Hilary Kennedy, owner of Live Oaks Realty. There's a lot of people who are moving here. And for those very reasons, are looking at a map when they're out of state and they're seeing, you know, proximity to the places they're going to be working."

Kennedy says Apple's recent decision to pause plans isn't slowing down consumer interest in homebuying in the area.

"I've had a few people reach out and say that even though Apple has paused the project, they still want to come down here. They're hoping to beat some sort of higher increase on home values," she said.

Fellow real estate broker Mike Montpetit, who specializes in homes in Cary, Apex and Morrisville, says demand is still greatly outpacing supply in that part of Wake County.

"I was checking the numbers this morning and we still don't have enough inventory to satisfy all the people that want to buy homes," Montpetit said.

It's a trend that local officials expect will continue. Morrisville Mayor TJ Cawley told ABC11 that the town's residential development plots have all been taken up -- meaning there's no place left to build homes in Morrisville.

"We're just nine square miles and nowhere for us to grow. So our housing market is always going to be really high pressure," Cawley said.

He said that's a testament to the town's explosion in the last 40 years, as it begins to mirror the breakneck growth of towns like Cary.

"In the 1980s, for example, Morrisville had 250 people. Now we have 32,000 people. So we've grown like a weed. People thought that we were only like flex space over near the airport. But then people discovered that on this side of (route) 54 they can build really nice housing," he said.

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Wake County officials and business leaders expressed confidence the project would eventually come to fruition.