Buying New At Sanctuary On 1st: The Appraisal Question The Brochure Won't Answer

What happens when the number your lender's appraiser writes down doesn't match the number you just agreed to pay?

For most buyers in most neighborhoods, that question gets answered by pulling comparable sales from a wide, independent pool of unrelated transactions. For a buyer purchasing new construction inside Sanctuary on 1st, the answer is more complicated, because the pool of comparable sales is small, recent, and dominated by one seller: the developer who is still building next door.

Sanctuary on 1st is an eleven-home gated enclave on 1st Street, a block off Main Street in downtown Highlands. It sits on two legacy parcels once owned by the Tate and Crane families, and it's the signature project of Sanctuary Developers, LLC, founded by Gary Williams, an Atlanta businessman whose family bought its first Highlands home atop Big Bear Pen Mountain in the early 1960s. Williams spent his career building two oil service companies in Texas before selling the last of them in 2015 and turning to residential development. Sanctuary on 1st, and its sister project The Sanctuary at Whiteside Cove, are what he's built since.

That backstory matters less for its charm than for what it implies about the transaction mechanics. With only eleven homesites, each a half-acre minimum, laid out along a private paved road with underground utilities, the enclave will never generate the volume of independent resales that makes appraising a typical subdivision straightforward. Most of the closed sales inside the gate to date have been the developer selling a spec home built by the same team: Sanctuary Developers, Futral Enterprises, and Summit Architecture, the Highlands-based firm with more than 47 combined years of architectural experience. When an appraiser needs a comparable sale for a new listing in the enclave, the most obvious ones are, in effect, the seller's own recent transactions rather than arm's-length resales between unrelated parties.

Why This Matters More In 2026 Than It Did Three Years Ago

The Highlands-Cashiers Plateau saw annual price growth of 15 to 20 percent in some pockets between 2020 and 2022, a run driven by pandemic-era demand for second homes with space and privacy. That pace has since normalized. Highlands market data from spring 2026 shows appreciation settling into a range of roughly 2 to 4 percent annually, a healthier but far slower climb.

Spec pricing set during the hotter years, or pricing anchored to a developer's expectation of continued rapid appreciation, can outrun what a conservative appraisal will support today. A developer's own marketing has compared early buyers in Sanctuary on 1st to early investors in Aspen's last major residential offerings, framing scarcity and tight supply as the reason values will keep climbing. That comparison might hold up over a long horizon. It is not, however, what an appraiser is instructed to consider. An appraiser is instructed to consider closed sales, condition, and current market trends, not a narrative about a mountain town's trajectory relative to Aspen's.

This is where the comp-pool problem and the slower market intersect. If the two or three most relevant closed sales an appraiser can find are all developer-to-buyer transactions from a period when list prices assumed faster appreciation, the resulting valuation may run behind the contract price on a new spec home signed today. A recent example: a 5-bedroom home at 33 Sanctuary Drive listed in spring 2026 at $4,795,000. That listing, along with any other closed sale inside the gate, becomes one of the few genuine data points an appraiser has to work with, for better or worse.

The North Carolina Timing Problem

There's a second layer to this that has nothing to do with Sanctuary on 1st specifically and everything to do with how North Carolina real estate contracts are structured. The standard Offer to Purchase and Contract used across the state does not include an automatic appraisal contingency the way contracts do in many other states. Instead, North Carolina buyers rely on the Due Diligence Period, the window during which a buyer can terminate the contract for any reason and recover earnest money, forfeiting only the separate, nonrefundable Due Diligence Fee.

That structure puts the burden of timing squarely on the buyer. If the appraisal comes back low while the Due Diligence Period is still open, the buyer has real leverage: renegotiate the price, bring additional cash, or walk away with earnest money intact. If the appraisal doesn't land until after the Due Diligence deadline has passed, that leverage disappears and the buyer is on the hook to close at the contract price or risk forfeiting the earnest money deposit, which on a multi-million dollar purchase is rarely a small sum.

For a straightforward resale with dozens of nearby comps, an appraisal usually moves quickly enough to fit inside a typical Due Diligence window. In a small, single-developer enclave where the appraiser may need extra time to identify and verify the handful of relevant sales, or may need to look outside the gate entirely for supporting data, that timeline is less predictable. A buyer who doesn't order the appraisal early, and who doesn't build enough runway into the Due Diligence Period to absorb a delay, can end up locked into a purchase price a lender's own valuation doesn't fully support.

There is a partial remedy if a low appraisal does surface: a Reconsideration of Value, a formal request submitted through the lender back to the original appraiser, allowing the buyer to present up to five additional comparable sales the appraiser may not have used. The appraiser typically has two business days to respond and isn't obligated to change the number, but it's a legitimate tool, and one that matters more, not less, in a market where relevant comps are scarce to begin with.

What This Means Before You Sign

None of this is a reason to avoid Sanctuary on 1st. It's a rare thing on the Highlands-Cashiers Plateau: brand-new construction, walkable to Main Street, inside a gated setting, built by a team with a track record in the market. What it does mean is that the appraisal step deserves more attention here than it might in a larger, more established neighborhood.

A few things worth doing before you're deep into a Due Diligence clock. Ask your agent to pull every closed sale inside the enclave itself, not just nearby listings on 1st Street or Main Street, since a home built by a different team on a different lot won't carry the same weight with an appraiser as a true within-gate comparable. Confirm with your lender how quickly the appraisal will be ordered and completed relative to your Due Diligence deadline, and if the timeline is tight, negotiate more days up front rather than scrambling later. If a valuation does come back under contract price, know that a Reconsideration of Value with specific, verifiable comps is a real option, not a formality.

One of the people who has represented recent sales inside Sanctuary on 1st is Mitzi Rauers, part of the same brokerage that carries decades of institutional memory on this particular enclave, having watched it move from legacy farmland to finished homes. That kind of familiarity with an eleven-lot development, where every closed sale is a data point worth knowing by name, is exactly the difference between a generic appraisal conversation and one grounded in what's actually happened behind that gate.

A Short FAQ

Does buying a spec home still under construction change how the appraisal works? Yes. Appraisers on new construction often weight the builder's cost basis and recent comparable closings more heavily than they would on an existing resale, which is part of why a thin, developer-dominated comp pool carries more weight here than it would in an established subdivision.

Can the developer's own recent sales count as legitimate comps? They can, and often they're the most relevant sales an appraiser has available in an eleven-home enclave. The caveat is that they reflect one seller's pricing decisions rather than a broad market consensus, which is worth keeping in mind when evaluating whether a new contract price is realistic.

What happens if my Due Diligence period ends before the appraisal comes back? Without a separately negotiated appraisal or financing contingency, you lose the ability to walk away and recover your earnest money. This is the single most important reason to order the appraisal early and to build enough time into your Due Diligence Period to accommodate a slower-than-usual turnaround.

If you're considering a purchase inside Sanctuary on 1st, or comparing it against other in-town enclaves on the plateau, the Michaud Rauers Group can walk through the specific comps, timing, and contract language that apply to this development before you're working against a deadline. Schedule a complimentary luxury listing consultation and get the numbers straight before you sign.