Real estate professionals in western North Carolina have a message: "We're back."
“Our biggest frustration is that people don't realize we're open for business, and so a lot of tourists have stayed away,” Beatrix Masotti, managing broker-in-charge at Premier Sotheby’s International Realty in Asheville, N.C., says. “The message we want to continue to resonate is we are open for business; we have beautiful homes for sale.”
The region is known for its vast mountain ranges, craft breweries, expansive art scene, and historic buildings. But a year ago, after a Category 4 hurricane barreled through, dumping more than 30 inches of rain over parts, it became synonymous with “Helene.”
Real estate professionals can feel the impact of a natural disaster in many ways: They may see listings wash away, economic activity dry up or lose their own home or business.
One year later, Masotti welcomes the sights and sounds of construction. They signal progress.
Masotti’s brokerage in Biltmore Village is one of only seven local businesses back up and running in the area. That list includes the Grand Bohemian hotel and The Corner Kitchen, a restaurant retrofitted in a house built 130 years ago.
“That's brought a lot of activity back to the village, which is really nice,” Masotti says.
Before the flood, “we had Talbots, Chicos, Williams Sonoma, Soma nearby. When I reopened up [in mid-May], they hadn't even started construction yet,” she says. “I was the lone ranger. And then suddenly ‘Dumpster Row,’ showed up, and they are literally all under construction right now, which is very heartwarming and exciting to see.”
People are buying homes in Asheville, she says, but unfortunately, “our markets are no different than what we’re experiencing around the country."
About 80 miles north in the one-stoplight town of Banner Elk, Lynne Lear, owner and broker of Lear Group Real Estate, is ready for tourism and real estate to return.
“October really is the biggest tourism month of the year here and having October canceled last year was devastating to a lot of businesses,” Lear says.
She reopened at the beginning of May, but business just hasn’t bounced back.
“Interest rates are high, faith in the economy is low,” she says. “Real estate is still very slow.”
Still, slow is better than stagnant. Both brokers remember when work screeched to a standstill—when there was just the storm and survival.
The Calm Before the Storm
Lear had just staged her office's grand opening. After a nearly four-decade career spanning three states, she felt the calling of mentorship.
“I wanted to build a team of these young lions who really needed direction,” she says.
When a building she had been eyeing for several years came on the market, she jumped. “That was my sign.”
On Wednesday, Sept. 25, Lear threw a party to mark the occasion.
“I did an eight-foot-long charcuterie table,” she recalls. “We had a bartender and live music.” Friends stopped by. So did agents she was hoping to attract to the brokerage, along with the owner of the local magazine.
It was raining outside, but Lear thought nothing of it. They toasted to new beginnings.
The next night, Hurricane Helene hit, “and the building ended up in the middle of a raging river,” Lear says.
“We had built so much momentum,” she says. “Then real estate, for all intents and purposes, got canceled for almost 8 months—certainly for 6 months.”
Lear knew the forecast called for an “unprecedented amount of rain.”
“I never in a million years thought that my own house would come so close to being washed away, or that I would spend the night in my downstairs bedroom closet listening to trees crashing onto my house because I had two tornadoes [hit] my house,” Lear says. “It's just far more devastating to everybody here than any of us could ever have imagined.”
The Storm
Hurricane Helene made landfall in north Florida—the strongest storm to do so in the Big Bend Region in more than a century—and quickly spiraled north, gusting through Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, before petering out in Kentucky and Tennessee.
The cyclone generated deadly winds, flash flooding, storm surges, landslides and tornadoes. It claimed the lives of at least 250 people, including more than 100 in North Carolina—who were just fully identified in July.
Interstates were cleft in half, cars were tossed upside down and homes were demolished into heaping piles of wood. The National Hurricane Center called Hurricane Helene “the most devastating natural disaster in western North Carolina’s history.”
The low-lying Banner Elk and Biltmore Village were no match against the overflowing rivers and rain gushing down mountainsides like a spout pouring water into a basin.
“Having the crevices between the mountains just act like funnels and turn creeks into raging rivers and rivers into cascading destruction—it was very shocking,” Lear says.
Over in Biltmore Village, the Swannanoa River broke its crest record by more than 6.6 feet.
Masotti couldn’t get to the Sotheby’s office until Sunday.
“I live on a farm,” she says. “My access road was completely covered in trees. We cut through 32 trees just to get down to the main road.”
When she eventually pulled up to 10 Brook Street, the scene was “surreal,” she says.
“There was thick mud everywhere,” Masotti says. “I had tall boots on and had to wade through mud. One of the doors was broken out at the front and I came into the front lobby area, furniture from the back of the building was piled up in the front.”
The building stands two feet above the 100-year floodplain, and it still took in more than six feet of water, mud and silt.
Picking Up the Pieces
Both Masotti and Lear’s offices had to be aired out and gutted. Both offices were taken down to their studs, and the electrical infrastructure was torn out.
Meanwhile, Lear’s primary residence wasn’t livable for eight weeks. A couple of Masotti’s agents lost their homes. They were far from the only ones.
In North Carolina, Helene caused roughly $60 billion in damages, wrecking and destroying tens of thousands of homes and cutting off residents from critical infrastructure like electricity, cell service, sewage and first responders.
Water didn’t return to Banner Elk or Asheville for weeks.
Neighbors shared what they could, restaurants whipped up hot meals, and World Central Kitchen volunteers and FEMA workers poured in.
Lear threw herself into charity, including running groceries to those without food and leading an initiative to supply portable heat systems for over 300 homes.
In the weeks and months that followed, resources for homeowners looking to rebuild popped up.
The REALTORS® Relief Foundation awarded $2.8 million in disaster relief to support states impacted by Hurricane Helene, with $1 million directed specifically to North Carolina for help in Asheville and the surrounding areas.
In June, the state opened Renew NC, the application portal for homeowners to apply for funding to repair, rebuild or replace primary homes damaged by Helene. Low- and moderate-income households are being prioritized.
And while there’s been a great deal of progress in the last twelve months, if you look, you can still see signs of the storms. Buildings along the Swannanoa River are still caked with mud and debris. A telephone pole partially snapped and was strapped to another one for support.
A historic red house at the entrance of Banner Elk came off its foundation and buckled. Lear is still moved to tears thinking about its owner standing outside talking to FEMA workers.
“She was patting the house like she was saying goodbye to it,” she recalls.
Parks still need to be redeveloped, hiking paths maintained, debris removed, and families resettled in their homes. And yet, municipalities are still working to bring back tourism—a lifeline for their economies.
Tourists spent close to $3 billion in Asheville in 2023 and supported roughly 29,000 local jobs.
Both Masotti and Lear are hoping for a tourism spending infusion as peak fall season arrives.
“There are still a lot of people really suffering who have no homes, or their businesses are completely washed away,” Masotti says. “But at the same time, there's a lot of businesses that are trying to reopen and reestablish and bringing people back in and knowing that we're open for business, I think, is a really critical point for us right now.”
Moving On But Not Forgetting
A commemorative plaque affixed to the wall of Masotti’s office reads: “The lower edge of this plaque is equal to the height of flood waters brought by Hurricane Helene ... may these timbers of White Oak (quercus alba), torn from the earth by that very storm, stand here in memory of those who lost their homes and their lives.”
While Lear says she still has trauma from the storm, she feels “hopeful” on this one-year milestone.
Banner Elk is planning a gathering outside their school that served as a food distribution site all those months ago.
“We’ll all go and see each other and just be a community together and thank each other and hug each other and be glad to have put it behind us to an extent,” she says.
