:: Metro Pulse Online :: -
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Published on: 3/2/2006
Last Visited: 3/2/2006
Kimberly Dixon Hamilton, the founder and principal salesperson for Downtown Realty, says her condominium-buying clients include reverse-commutingOak Ridge engineers, along with other West Knoxville professionals.She says she gets calls from interested parties from Florida and California, seeking to relocate their first or second homes to downtown Knoxville and from ,investors, who wish to buy downtown Knoxville residences to hold for resale down the road on the premise that urban-living prices are going to continue to rise and that Knoxville is still a good buy.
Hamilton, whose husband is with the U.S. Attorney,s office here, came to Knoxville a little over three years ago and got in on one of the ,ground-floor, redevelopment properties as a management and sales agent.
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SELLING BEFORE GROUNDBREAKING: Downtown Realty founder Kimberly Dixon Hamilton.
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And, the Knoxville downtown represents the closest thing to urbanity in a much wider region with as many as a million people, some of whom are surely looking to locate here, as Hamilton,s Oak Ridge clients show.
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,I,d love to see a private school open up downtown,, says Hamilton, whose sales would obviously benefit from the opening up of another market segment.Plans once on the drawing board for a university school in the World,s Fair Park vicinity, in a cooperative arrangement between UT and Knox County schools, were scrapped almost 20 years ago when the county chickened out, blaming its school board,s negative attitude on the feeling that the university wanted absolute control over programs and curriculum.It was envisioned as a downtown magnet school, with UT,s department of education participating and experimenting, but it came to naught.
Shopping, Hamilton says from experience, is not as big a problem as some people may see.She says groceries and pharmacies are plentiful a couple of miles down Chapman Highway, that a new Food City is about to open even closer, on Western Avenue, and that the proposed specialty food market in a former Watson,s department store building on the west side of Market Square, though months behind schedule, is not dead yet.
A downtown druggist would fill the other most pressing need, she says, as the empty nesters,Baby Boomers in age,are developing more health needs as they grow older.