Farrior Hills Fought Over a $2.9 Million Average in 2023. A $9.25 Million House Just Answered the Question.

Pull comps for a resale in Farrior Hills and you will get two entirely different neighborhoods depending on which stat lands in front of you. One reading puts the typical home in the high six figures. Another puts it well north of two million dollars. Both are accurate. Neither is wrong. And if you are the loan officer trying to justify a mortgage, or the buyer trying to figure out what a fair offer looks like, that gap is not a rounding error. It is the entire problem.

This is what happens in a small, high-value pocket where sales are rare enough that a single closing can swing the median by seven figures. Farrior Hills, tucked behind North Hills off Six Forks Road, is exactly that kind of market. And three years ago, a public argument over one contested number in this neighborhood turned out to forecast, almost exactly, what the land itself was about to decide.

The number nobody believed

In August 2023, a developer named Marquis Realty and a builder called Affinity Building Company proposed six to eight townhomes on two lots along Dartmouth Road in Farrior Hills. Longtime resident John Duncan, who had lived on the street for two decades, organized his neighbors against it. The fight made local news, and it followed a familiar Raleigh script: townhomes proposed under the city's Missing Middle reforms, neighbors pushing back, a petition circulated ahead of a Midtown Citizens Advisory Council meeting.

What made this particular fight interesting was not the zoning dispute. It was the math the builder used to defend the project's price point. Affinity's Ryan Eldridge told reporters that building anything under a million dollars was not realistic given acquisition and construction costs, and he pointed to the neighborhood's average sale price over the prior twelve months as evidence: $2,895,000.

Duncan and a neighbor named Mason pushed back hard. They argued the figure was skewed by a handful of new-construction mega-homes and did not reflect the actual ranch houses many residents were living in.

"My home was definitely cheaper than that, that price range."

That quote, from Mason, is the crux of the whole disagreement. He was right that his own home did not sell for anywhere near $2.9 million. He was also, as it turned out, arguing against a number that was not describing his house at all. It was describing the direction the street was already heading.

What the land actually decided

Whatever became of that specific two-lot proposal, the pattern that has since played out on Dartmouth Road answers the question the 2023 argument never resolved. Look at how the headline price on this one small street moved across roughly two years.

Notice that in the same stretch of 2023 when the fight was happening, two entirely different price tags were true at once. The average sale price over the prior year was $2.9 million. The median list price of what was actually sitting on the market a few months later was $719,000. Neither number was fabricated. One measured closed sales skewed by new construction. The other measured a snapshot of current listings that still included older, unrenovated homes. A buyer, seller, or appraiser pulling comps in Farrior Hills during that window could have landed anywhere in a $2.2 million spread depending on which figure they grabbed first.

Then came October 2024, when the median sale price jumped to $5.15 million, up 40.1 percent from the year before. In a pocket where only a handful of homes trade hands in a given year, that kind of swing does not require a trend. It only takes one or two atypical closings landing in the same stretch.

And then, in November 2025, a new listing appeared for 300 Dartmouth Road: an 11,285-square-foot custom home built by St. Clair Construction Group, priced at $9.25 million. Five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, an infinity-edge pool with a waterfall, a private fitness studio, a golf simulator, and an indoor basketball and pickleball court, all sitting on a wooded lot the listing describes as beneath the canopy of North Hills. Multiple listing records also show new custom builds delivered nearby on the same street around the same time, developed through Exeter Building Company on presale lots. Whatever the specific outcome of the original townhome proposal, the redevelopment that has actually materialized on Dartmouth Road since the fight has trended toward fewer units and far higher ceilings, not more units at a lower price point.

Why this was never really an argument about an average

The disagreement in 2023 sounded like a dispute over statistics. It was actually a dispute over which economic model the land under Dartmouth Road could support, and the builder's own numbers already answered it.

Eldridge said a townhome community under a million dollars was not financially workable there once you accounted for acquisition and construction costs. If that floor is real, splitting a lot into six or eight units to hit price points near $1.5 million barely clears the cost of building at all, especially once financing, permitting, and site work are added on top of land that already commands a premium because of its proximity to North Hills. Consolidating the same land under a single structure, by contrast, lets a builder capture the full ceiling the location supports rather than dividing it into thinner slices. Once dirt gets expensive enough in a specific pocket, the incentive tips hard toward building one exceptional house instead of several good ones. That is not a story about Raleigh housing policy. It is a story about what a particular lot, in a particular location, next to a particular amenity, can actually bear.

It is worth separating this from the broader Raleigh picture, too. The city's Missing Middle reforms from 2021 and 2022 remain active policy, and a separate legal challenge to those reforms is still working through Wake County courts over an unrelated project in Hayes Barton. That case could eventually affect what is buildable citywide. But on Dartmouth Road specifically, the market did not wait for a courtroom to settle anything. It already chose.

What this means if you are the one holding the deed

If you own an older home in Farrior Hills, or you are evaluating one, the relevant comparison is not the house down the street. It is what a builder would pay for your lot alone. A dated ranch on a generous, well-placed parcel near North Hills may be worth more to a custom builder for its dirt than it would ever fetch after a kitchen remodel, and that changes how you think about timing a sale, staging a listing, or negotiating with a buyer who is quietly running the same numbers you are.

If you are shopping a resale here, expect appraisal friction. With so few sales in a given year, and those sales split between modest older homes and eight-figure new construction, an appraiser may struggle to find anything genuinely comparable to the specific house you are trying to finance. Building in an appraisal gap contingency, or working with a lender who understands thin-market pockets like this one, is not overcautious. It is realistic.

And if you are the one considering a teardown or a custom build on a Farrior Hills lot, the Dartmouth Road pattern is your clearest local evidence of what this land actually supports right now. Understanding whether a given parcel can carry that kind of ceiling, or whether it cannot, is exactly where construction and land experience earns its keep before you ever sign a contract.

A short FAQ for buyers looking at Farrior Hills

Does this mean townhomes are permanently off the table here? Not citywide. Raleigh's Missing Middle ordinance is still in effect, and the litigation testing it is ongoing in a different neighborhood. But on this specific street, the redevelopment that has actually happened points toward single luxury builds, and that pattern is likely to hold as long as land costs stay this high.

Why did the median jump so much between 2023 and 2024? Volume. A neighborhood this small can see a single closing move the median by millions in either direction. Treat any one-month median here as a data point, not a trend.

Is an unrenovated older home in Farrior Hills a bad investment? Not necessarily. Its value may have very little to do with the condition of the house and almost everything to do with the size, shape, and location of the lot beneath it. That is a different question than most buyers know to ask, and it is worth getting a construction-literate opinion before you price it either way.

If you are trying to make sense of what a specific Farrior Hills lot or listing is actually worth, Jared L Cozart has spent 20-plus years reading land economics like this one from both sides of the table, as a general contractor and as a broker. You can also start with a current home valuation or browse the Farrior Hills neighborhood page for more on what's happening in this pocket of Midtown. Let's Connect.