Home to at least four billionaires, the low-key, ‘no frills’ enclave of Cashiers has one of the country’s highest concentrations of wealth.
7 min
CASHIERS, N. C.—Shortly before 4 p.m. on a recent November afternoon, Buck’s Coffee Cafe was buzzing with a steady stream of customers that included a local chef, the scion of a hot-sauce empire, a real-estate developer and others.
Two Porsches and a pickup truck were parked in front of the shop, which serves as a de facto town hall at the intersection of North Carolina Highway 107 and U.S. Route 64.
If Cashiers had a town centre, this would be it: a crossroads surrounded by a smattering of retail.
In the Blue Ridge Mountains, the unincorporated village has no mayor, no local police force and no central public water supply. There is a limited public sewer system, just a handful of sidewalks and one Ingles supermarket, affectionately known as “Mingles” because it is where locals tend to socialise.
But what Cashiers does have is lots of uber-wealthy homeowners who have been coming to the area for more than a century.
With a full-time population of just 825—and at least four billionaires with homes—Cashiers has one of the highest concentrations of wealth in the country, according to data from Altrata, a wealth-intelligence firm.
Drawn to the area’s climate and natural beauty, most deep-pocketed homeowners, including billionaires like Ken Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot, and members of Nashville’s Ingram family, own property in a half-dozen private golf communities fanning out from the main intersection.
Even as real-estate values in Cashiers (pronounced Cash-ERS) nearly doubled over the past five years, locals have resisted overdevelopment in favour of retaining its small-town character, which provides relative anonymity to its wealthiest residents.
A September article in The Wall Street Journal, disclosing the presence of four billionaire families, got the community talking.
“People said, ‘Four? What an insult. We’ve got more than that,’” said Ann McKee Austin, who summered in Cashiers as a child and who co-developed, with her brother William McKee, the Wade Hampton Golf Club in the 1980s. “It attracts low-key people, not jet-set people,” said Austin.
South Carolina politician Wade Hampton III, a Confederate general, was among the first to build a summer lodge in Cashiers in the 1800s.
By the 1980s, golf communities with courses designed by Tom Fazio, Arnold Palmer and others began sprouting up in the area.
Today, there are at least 15 clubs on the Highlands-Cashiers Plateau, a roughly 25-mile area that includes Cashiers and its sister town of Highlands, a quaint tourist destination with high-end shops, restaurants and hotels.
By contrast, Cashiers has no Main Street and is “no frills,” said real-estate agent Kati Miller of Caliber Fine Property, comparing it to the fictional town of Mayberry. “You’re not going to see Prada or any sort of chain. It’s hard to get to—the closest airport is 45 minutes away on windy one-lane roads.”
Life in both places largely revolves around the clubs, where the average home-sale price was roughly $5.4 million over the past three months, said Ali Moody of Caliber.
Owning property is often a prerequisite to membership, which costs upward of $100,000 plus annual dues. Besides amenities like golf, tennis, croquet and dining, clubs also provide infrastructure like roads, water and sewer systems, making construction of luxury homes possible.
“Clubs are like mini-cities, quite frankly,” said Jody Lovell of Highlands-Cashiers Sotheby’s International Realty. Some clubs even provide workforce housing.
Over the years, the ranks of wealthy residents have swelled to include Langone, who paid less than $1 million combined to buy 5.77 acres at Wade Hampton in the 1990s, records show. (For many years, the late Bernie Marcus, another co-founder of Home Depot, also had a place there.) Martha Ingram, who succeeded her late husband as chairman of the billionaire family’s conglomerate Ingram Industries ,bought at the Chattooga Club more than three decades ago.
Langone said he was visiting a friend for the weekend when he toured Wade Hampton and was “blown away” by the newly-built golf course. He bought land before he left and built a four-bedroom home that he has added to over the years.
He said people in Cashiers are civic-minded, hard-working, and kind. “I go there, and they treat me like I’m just anybody else,” he said, “which is the way it should be. ”
Martha’s son, David Ingram, and his wife, Sarah, own several properties at Chattooga—and they recently purchased the club from his uncle (and Martha’s brother) John Rivers, who developed it in the 1980s.
Members of the McIlhenny family, which has been making Tabasco in Louisiana since the 1800s, also own in Cashiers, as does billionaire Scott Hardman Ward, a scion of Russell Stover candies, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent , who spent $4.6 million in 2022. He is now looking to sell his property for $5.25 million.
Billionaire energy mogul William Doré owns two homes in Wade Hampton, which he purchased for about $3 million combined in 2016 and 2019. And Ric Elias, the billionaire CEO of Red Ventures, recently sold a roughly 2.6-acre lot at the Club at High Hampton for $2.5 million, after paying $2.25 million in 2023. Elias and Bessent didn’t comment. Ward, Doré and the McIlhenny family didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Year-round residents say wealthy “summer people” don’t get any special attention. Pro golfers with homes in the area regularly grab a slice at Slab Town Pizza, said restaurant manager Scott Mulchay. No one bats an eye.
Langone said one of his favourite events is a July Fourth get-together hosted by a family at High Hampton, who serve barbecue; people dress in Americana, sing patriotic songs and fire off a mini-cannon, he said.
“We don’t need to prove what we have or show what we have,” he said. “We just enjoy everyone’s company.”
Despite its unpretentiousness, a turning point for the Cashiers luxury market came in the early 2000s, when Discovery Land Co., the developer behind Montana’s Yellowstone Club, opened Mountaintop Golf & Lake Club, drawing more well-heeled buyers not just from the Southeast, but other parts of the country. The McKee family’s sale of the High Hampton Inn in 2017 to the operator of Tennessee’s popular Blackberry Farm, which renovated the historic property, had a similar effect. undefined
Rob Palumbo, who works in the financial services industry in Atlanta, fell in love with Cashiers’ tranquillity 25 years ago, and for years he owned a log cabin on the Tuckasegee River. In 2013, he and his wife, Melanie Palumbo, paid $800,000 for a 2.3-acre lot at Mountaintop and built a six-bedroom house.
Like other resort areas, Cashiers experienced a Covid boom that turbocharged home prices.
Between 2020 and 2024, the average home sale price jumped 88.8% from $1.05 million to $1.98 million, according to data from the multiple listing service. Despite economic uncertainty that has slowed the luxury market nationwide, Cashiers recently had a string of sales above $7 million—a once-untouchable price point.
“For the longest time, $6 million was the ceiling,” said Caliber’s Miller, who said prices are rising as new homes sell for the first time.
The record in Cashiers was set in July, when a house at Mountaintop with a glass-and-steel facade sold for $11.11 million, said listing agent Liz Harris of Cashiers Sotheby’s International Realty. The prior owner paid $600,000 for the 1.85-acre lot in 2020, records show. “What kept [the market] down before, honestly, was people didn’t know about it,” Harris said. The buyer couldn’t be determined.
Earlier this month, a 6.5-acre estate at Cullasaja Club—halfway between Cashiers and Highlands—sold for $12 million.
Some real-estate insiders say the market, as it currently exists, can only grow so much.
Cashiers has six months’ worth of world-class golf between May and October, but there is less to draw people there during the “shoulder” seasons, said developer Sam Lupas.
A bigger issue is inventory. Many of the clubs have waiting lists, Miller said, even Mountaintop, where the initiation fee will be $275,000 starting January 1. “I hate to say it, but we need another club up here,” she said. “They’re all full.”
In 2003, locals voted against incorporation out of fear of paying higher taxes or ceding autonomy to government bureaucracy. Instead, local philanthropists have supported a local charter school, library, boys and girls club and volunteer fire department.
Two decades ago, when a hotel developer tried to build an Econo Lodge near the main intersection, residents swooped in to purchase the land. They designed a Village Green that is encircled with a low stone wall, and a hard-to-find entrance in the rear. “It was meant to be for the people that live here, and you access it from behind the scenes, rather than ‘Stop here and have a picnic lunch,’” said Austin.
Over the past few years, Cashiers has experienced growing pains amid its newfound popularity. During the summer months, traffic can back up for miles, said the Rev. Steve Hines, a retired clergyman who is a member of the Chattooga Club. “There were wealthy people here before, but not at this level,” he said. The growth “has gotten a little out of hand.”
Affordable housing is also an issue, said Jackie Hooper Hernandez, a clerk at Lulu & You clothing boutique, who said she is lucky to live with a relative about 8 miles from the shop. Other family members drive more than 30 minutes to work. But she puts up with the inconveniences of the summer influx because her livelihood depends on it. “We might hate the traffic,” she said, “but you know, if we didn’t have that, I wouldn’t have a job,” she said.
Some people think Cashiers would be better off incorporating, so that it could benefit from having its own tax base and public infrastructure.
But others believe there is reason to fear overdevelopment. “I’ve witnessed an overbuilding [at other clubs], where going to dinner or getting a tee time for golf almost became a lottery system,” said Hufstetler, who just bought the $12 million house in Cullasaja. He previously owned homes in Destin, Fla., and on Lake Oconee, Ga., that he sold when those areas became too crowded.
Lupas said he and his partners are working on an effort to bring hospitality, retail and housing to Cashiers in a way that is both appropriate and “authentic” to the community. “Some people think I’m an evil developer,” but he said the opposite is true. He believes a certain amount of growth is good for Cashiers, if not necessary. “Everybody wants it to stay like it was in 1950, but it’s not possible.”
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A student-run real estate investment fund is proving that hands-on experience can deliver real results. Managing $12 million in equity, the undergraduate team recently achieved a 65% gross return on its first property sale, highlighting the growing role of experiential learning in preparing the next generation of real estate professionals.
5 min
On a recent summer Sunday afternoon, Brooks Hiller was hunkered over his laptop at his apartment in Chicago, dialing in to hour three of a marathon series of conference calls on real-estate deals.
The 21-year-old isn’t a professional, and he doesn’t make a dime from this work. He is a rising senior at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, where he leads a team of 20 undergraduates who manage about $12 million in equity.
Those students operate their own real-estate investment business, called Sample Gates Management, named for the Gothic-style limestone arches that are the gateway to the Bloomington campus.
Unlike the many student investment clubs that deploy university money or rely on donations, the Indiana group raises funds from third parties and invests in properties across the country, such as apartment developments and industrial parks.
As a high schooler, Hiller was so enamored with the program—by most accounts, the undergraduate-run real-estate investment group that manages the most capital—that he chose to attend Indiana with hopes of being a part of it.
“Students get the experience, the school gets a better education for their students, and the investors are making their money back and get to be a part of the program again,” Hiller said. “I really wanted to be part of that.”
The group’s success is emblematic of changes transforming both higher education and the real-estate industry.
An industry that once revolved around information shared at private clubs or events has become a highly digitized landscape. It’s now flooded with standardized public-market data, so much so that undergraduates can readily peer inside and participate on nearly equal footing.
Meanwhile, colleges in recent decades have championed what is called “experiential learning,” encouraging students to do the hands-on work that will teach them the practical job skills they can’t learn in traditional classroom settings. Plus, dozens of universities now offer real-estate degrees, minors or concentrations for undergraduates.
“At its core, this program wouldn’t have existed 30 years ago,” said Harvard University real-estate professor Avis Devine.
This summer, Sample Gates Management sold its first investment, an industrial warehouse development in Indianapolis. In about 16 months, the fund earned a 65% gross profit on that property.
“That’s a really fantastic return in this environment,” one that would be “good for sort of any professional firm, not just students,” said Tim Morris, a member of the board responsible for approving the students’ investments, who is a founder and co-managing partner of the real-estate firm Proprium Capital Partners.
That property was an “easy yes” investment, Tom Peck, the students’ faculty adviser, recalled. It would diversify the group’s investment portfolio, and a reliable tenant was committed to leasing the building once it was finished, Peck said.
Most of the fund remains tied up in investments, making it difficult to gauge exactly how well it is performing overall.
A decade ago, there were only a few student-managed real-estate funds in the country. Today, there are at least 18, and two more are set to launch this school year, according to Mariya Letdin, a real-estate professor at Florida State University who has researched student-managed investment funds and advises one herself.
And yet, although a program like Sample Gates is an attractive resume line that provides unique experience among undergraduates, it isn’t necessarily a launching pad to help students secure jobs. Because of Wall Street’s summer-internship pipelines and early recruiting timelines, many of the 20 seniors in the group have already secured full-time jobs at global giants before they even touch Sample Gates funds.
In fact, the students’ professional experience—some of them participate in internships all three summers of college—is often a boon for Sample Gates. Students’ stints at institutional shops have left them with a “networking mindset” that “snowballs very quickly into a really, really good Rolodex,” Morris said.
At the Kelley School, where currently 278 students are majoring in real estate, faculty picked only 20 to manage the private-equity fund. The rising seniors were selected from Kelley’s already competitive roughly 60-student commercial real-estate workshop, in which students analyze deals and pitch them to mock committees.
In 2022, for the group’s first round of fundraising, Sample Gates raised $4.2 million from 46 investors, 40% more than their goal of $3 million. Last year’s cohort raised $7.8 million from 74 investors in the second round of fundraising, with one investor forking over $700,000. Some investors put money into both funds.
Many of the investors are Indiana alumni now working in the real-estate industry themselves. They expect the students to return a profit, but they are also enthusiastic about fostering the young program and meeting standout students.
The student managers screen between three and eight deals each week, which could mean they evaluate up to 400 potential investments a year. However, between 2023 and 2025, they selected only 12 investments, ranging in location from Indiana to Arizona.
Once a potential investment passes an initial screening, a team builds financial models and meets with prospective partners to pressure-test the viability of a deal.
For students to move forward with an investment, they must present it to their investment committee, a board of 10 seasoned real-estate executives. The committee has to sign off on all deals, and they reject roughly a third of the ones the undergraduates bring to the table.
And if the students think they can pitch an investment without getting their eyes on the physical property—regardless of where it is located— they would best think again.
Some observers predict that students might be disappointed when they start their full-time jobs because of the shift from doing the highest-level work of managing a fund to being a lowly analyst at a large firm.
“To have all of these skill sets in a short period of time and then to go be an associate for Blackstone would be mentally defeating,” said Rhett Trees, an investor in Sample Gates and Indiana alum who is the chief executive of a Denver-based real-estate private-equity firm.
