Moving to Raleigh from Atlanta? Apex and Holly Springs Will Feel Like Home

If you're relocating from Atlanta, a lot of this is going to feel immediately familiar: fast-growing suburbs, newer construction, master-planned communities, parks everywhere, strong schools — and a fair amount of driving.

Apex and Holly Springs are the Triangle's version of that, and they've grown at a pace Atlanta transplants recognize.

The growth is real, and so is the planning

The numbers are striking. Apex went from 37,476 residents in 2010 to about 80,419 by mid-2025 — up nearly 25% since 2020 alone. Holly Springs went from 24,661 to roughly 50,288 over the same span, doubling in fifteen years.

Growth that fast can produce sprawl. What makes these two different is that it mostly didn't. These are master-planned communities, not houses dropped wherever land was cheap, and the planning shows in how the towns function day to day.

The recognition has followed. Apex was Money magazine's #1 Best Place to Live in America in 2015, ranked #7 nationally in U.S. News's 2025–2026 list, and holds Niche's #1 spot for best places to raise a family in North Carolina for 2026.

The communities worth knowing

12 Oaks in Holly Springs is the clearest example of what a master-planned community can be here. It covers 687 acres around an 18-hole Nicklaus Design course that opened in 2010. Housing runs the full range — townhomes, golf cottages, single-family homes, and larger properties facing the course — with multiple pools, tennis and pickleball, a fitness center, community gardens, on-site dining and more than twenty miles of trails.

Sweetwater in Apex took the opposite approach: build the homes first, then put the retail out front. The residential neighborhood arrived in 2016; Sweetwater Town Center is a 45-acre mixed-use district designed to feel like a New England village. It has a 65,000-square-foot Harris Teeter that opened in fall 2024, Southern Peak Brewery, Al's Burger Shack, Foxtail Coffee, Club Pilates, a Duke Health office and around 230 apartments above the retail.

Shepherd's Vineyard in Apex deserves a mention for one specific reason: the swim team. The Shepherd's Vineyard Killer Whales compete in the Tarheel Swimming Association, North Carolina's largest summer recreational youth league, and moved up from Division 3 to Division 2 for the 2026 season. If you have kids and summer swim was part of your Atlanta life, it's alive and well here. (Davis's theory is that half the neighborhood moved there because it's across the street from Costco. Both things can be true.)

The downtowns have been transformed

This is the part longtime residents find hardest to believe.

Downtown Apex is a genuine historic district — 60 contributing buildings from 1870 to 1940 along Salem Street, listed on the National Register in 1994, anchored by the 1914 Apex Union Depot. The town is named for being the highest point on the Chatham Railroad between Richmond and Jacksonville. There's a $4.7 million streetscape project underway on Salem Street right now, with two-way traffic set to return when it wraps.

Downtown Holly Springs was, not that long ago, a punchline. It now has a downtown brand, a Sip-and-Stroll zone for events, a mural program, a planned festival street, and — the detail that gets Davis every time — a genuinely good sushi restaurant. His family has been in Holly Springs a long time. Sushi was not previously on the menu.

For outdoors, Bass Lake Park in Holly Springs has a two-mile loop around the lake and a nature center; Pleasant Park in Apex opened in 2023 with 92 acres of fields and courts; and the three-mile Middle Creek Greenway opened in 2024, with Apex building a connecting segment north.

The thing you should know before you start looking

Apex and Holly Springs used to be the affordable alternative to Raleigh. That is no longer true, and the gap has gone the other way.

As of July 2026, per Redfin: the median sale price was about $625,000 in Apex and $629,000 in Holly Springs, against roughly $421,000 in Raleigh. Both towns run about 49% above the Raleigh median — Holly Springs now trails only Cary in the region.

For perspective on the run-up: when Money named Apex the best place to live in America in 2015, the median home price it cited was $243,125.

We mention this because Atlanta buyers often arrive with the older mental model — head to the outer suburbs, save money. Here you're paying a premium for those towns, and you should decide with that in front of you. What you get for it is the planning, the schools, the parks and the community feel. Those are real. They're just not cheap anymore.

What Atlanta transplants tend to love

There's a particular loyalty in these towns. We had clients who'd never spent time in Apex, liked a house, and bought there almost by accident in 2017. They fell for the town completely, and a few years ago built a home in the downtown so they could walk to everything.

That's a common arc. People who live in Apex or Holly Springs are ride-or-die about it in a way that's unusual even for well-liked suburbs.

Coming from somewhere else? We matched eight cities to their closest Triangle equivalent:

New York City · Washington, D.C. · Los Angeles · San Francisco & Boston · Chicago · Austin

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