Allie Russell

05/28/2026

For the home cook! What are your favorite spices to cook with?

Are you looking to add spice to your home cooking, but not heat? Here are five interesting flavors t...

05/28/2026

After you tour as many houses as I have, you start noticing the details builders skip.
Bost didn't skip any.

These are the five features at 58 Mint Springs I keep thinking about, in the order they came back to me on the drive home:

The pre-planned elevator shaft. Most builders don't think 20 years out. This one did.

The wine cellar (actual cellar, not a wine closet pretending to be one).

The hidden room (which I'm still not telling you about).

The way the porch opens to the full 5 acres at once instead of a narrow framed view.

The light. Specifically the way the east-facing rooms fill up around 8am and the west-facing rooms hold the sun until almost 7pm in May.

That last one is the one that's hardest to capture in photos and the easiest to feel when you're standing there.

Comment MINT or send me a message and I'll show you in person.

(4 BR, 6 BA, 4,884 sq ft, 5+ acres, $2.1M, Bost Custom Homes, 15 minutes to Chapel Hill)

Allie Russell and Claire Pope, Hodge & Kittrell
Sotheby's International Realty
📞 919-624-6919
📧 [email protected]

📞 919-624-6919
📧 [email protected]

05/21/2026

Starting an emergency fund can be difficult, but cutting your extraneous spending for just one month can make it easier.

Nearly half of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and 61 percent don’t have enough money to ...

05/16/2026

05/16/2026

05/16/2026

The conversation I keep having this spring:

“We’d build, but it takes too long.”

Here’s what I tell people. The “too long” math used to work. In 2026 it doesn’t.
A finished home in Chapel Hill right now sits an average of 65 days on market. By the time you tour, negotiate, inspect, close, and renovate the kitchen you knew you’d hate, you’re 18 months in.

A custom build at Jones Ferry with Paragon? You’re in the same window. Except at the end of it, you have a brand new house designed for how YOU actually live, on five acres, 15 minutes from UNC.

Three sites left. Comment BUILD or send me a message and I’ll send the lot survey.

Allie Russell, Hodge & Kittrell Sotheby’s International Realty 
📞 919-624-6919 
📧 [email protected]

05/14/2026

While student credit cards can help college students build credit, they do come with some conditions.

Building good credit takes time, and it can be a few years before college students or graduates have...

05/13/2026

A walk-through, in 10 slides.

People keep asking me what's inside this house, and the photos do not do it justice. They never do. But here's a tour as close to the real thing as Instagram will let me get.

The thing the slides cannot capture is how the house feels when you're standing in it. The light through the windows. The way the porch opens up to all five acres at once. The hidden room moment, which I'm still not going to spoil for you.

Save this for the friend who's been searching for months and hasn't found it yet. Or send me a message and let me show you the parts that don't fit in a square frame.

(4 BR, 6 BA, 4,884 sq ft, 5+ acres, $2.1M, Bost Custom Homes, 15 minutes to Chapel Hill)

Allie Russell, Hodge & Kittrell Sotheby's International Realty
📞 919-624-6919
📧 [email protected]

05/11/2026

Listed at $2.1M. Let's talk, 58 Mint Springs.

Brand new build by Bost Custom Homes. 4 bedrooms, 6 baths, 4,884 square feet, sitting on five acres in Chatham. Wine cellar. Fitness studio. A pre-planned elevator shaft that nobody asks for and everyone needs eventually. And a room I'm not putting on Instagram, because some things are better as a moment when you walk in.

$2.1M, and here's why that number is wild: that's $430 a square foot for new construction. Inside Chapel Hill proper, the same build quality is running closer to $650 a foot, on a fraction of the land. The five acres alone, if you tried to buy them inside the city limits, would clear $800K before you laid a single board.

You're getting more home, more land, and a brand new build by one of the best custom builders in the Triangle, for what feels like a rounding error compared to Chapel Hill numbers right now.

Comment MINT and I'll get you on the calendar this week.

Allie Russell, Hodge & Kittrell Sotheby's International Realty
📞 919-624-6919
📧 [email protected]