Are you moving to Atlanta and want to buy a home? Are you worried about recent rate hikes? Watch this video about the Atlanta Housing Market and find out why now may be a great time to buy.
Well, Georgia’s strong economy great weather and low cost of living has gotten a lot of people interested in moving to the state, and if Georgia’s on your mind you’ve come to the right place. I’m a native born Georgian, been here my entire life, and I’m here to tell you the things you need to know before you move to Georgia. Now this video is going to focus on the people and the culture of Georgia. If you’re interested in knowing about the weather, the economy and the geography of Georgia, I’ve posted some links to some of my other videos in the comment section below.
Georgia’s history began in 1733 when Savannah was founded by the British. The name Georgia was chosen to honor King George II. If you’ve never been to Savannah Georgia I promise you it is one of the most beautiful cities anywhere in America.
First up people are so friendly in Georgia. Southern hospitality is a real thing. Total strangers will walk by and wave and say hello, and people behind you in the grocery store line will strike up a conversation. Georgia people are genuinely interested in who you are, where you’re from, where you went to school, your life story. People in Georgia love to talk and have long conversations, and they love to laugh, they’re great storytellers.
Let’s talk about manners. If you come to Georgia please bring your best manners!. Part of being super social and friendly is that Georgians are also incredibly polite people. We’re not big on honking horns and road rage incidents. We are big on saying please and thank you. It may seem a bit anachronistic, but people will still call you sir and ma’am, especially when you get outside of the big cities. One thing I can guarantee you is if you’re at the store and your hands are full somebody will hold the door open for you and oftentimes even if your hands aren’t full they’ll still hold the door open for you.
There are almost 11 million people in the state of Georgia and 7 million in Atlanta alone but it never feels cramped or crowded. It’s not grand central station at rush hour. You don’t have to fight for space you get a lot of personal space. Here people are very much live and let live. Nobody’s in your business – being a busybody is very much frowned upon in Georgia.
Now in Atlanta most people don’t actually have a southern accent obviously lots of people move here from other places but even people I’ve known who’ve lived here their entire lives don’t have a southern accent like me for instance. I don’t have an accent do i? Once you get about 45 minutes outside of Atlanta you really start to hear that classic southern drawl.
You also get a lot of handwritten thank you notes. Georgia people are very appreciative of any kindness and will always take the time to sit down and write you a thank you note .
Let’s talk about food. Food is really big here in Georgia. If you get invited to a party do not come empty-handed. If it’s a catered event bring a bottle of wine. Actually if you get invited to a party just always bring a bottle of wine. Barbecue is serious business here. Everybody has their personal favorite barbecue joint and you will hear long discussions about why this place or that has the best barbecue. Another specialty here is boiled peanuts. Now boiled peanuts are a southern delicacy usually served up piping hot from a giant steaming cauldron – they are salty delicious and insanely addictive. Another southern tradition is on new year’s day we eat greens for money and black eyed peas for good luck. One final southern tradition is the meal train. If a neighbor is sick or has a new baby all the other neighbors will pitch in cook a bunch of meals and make sure they don’t have to do any cooking. So as always if you’re thinking about making the move to Georgia my contact information is in the box below feel free to reach out send me a text send me an email love to talk to you help you find your new home in Georgia.
So is Atlanta a good place to live? Well I think so! We’re going to talk about the pros and cons of living in Atlanta.
Number one- Atlantans are friendly! You may feel a little awkward the first time a complete stranger smiles at you and waves at you, but that’s how it is here. It’s a very friendly environment, and people are genuinely curious about who you are and where you’re from and your life story.
Your neighbors will invite you over for dinner. It may seem a little strange at first how friendly people are, but you’ll get used to it pretty quick.
Pro number two: Atlanta’s cost of living. Atlanta has a much lower cost of living than many other metropolitan areas around the United States. If you go to Nerd Wallet’s cost of living calculator, you can put in your current city and income and see how it compares with Atlanta. In this case I’m checking out Los Angeles, and you can see that Atlanta is 30 percent less expensive and housing in particular is 56 percent less expensive in Atlanta.
Nerd Wallet’s cost of living calculator is a great tool if you’re interested in comparing your current situation with what life would be like if you move to Atlanta.
Pro number three: travel. Atlanta is a great place to live if you love to travel! Most Atlantans probably take it for granted, but we’re spoiled by having one of the busiest airports in the United States and you can get to almost any place in the world non-stop from Atlanta’s international airport. Add to that you’re less than two hours from the lovely Blue Ridge mountains in North Georgia, or you can hop in the car and head down to the Atlantic Ocean, and you’ll be on the beach in less than five hours!
Pro number four: job opportunities. If you’re looking for great job opportunities, Atlanta is the home to many fortune 500 companies, including Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Home Depot and UPS. Atlanta has also become a center for high-tech investment from companies like Microsoft and Google. Georgia Tech has a small business incubator which has done a tremendous job bringing high-tech industries to Atlanta.
You may not realize this, but so many films and television shows are produced in Georgia that is now called the Hollywood of the South. Every week when I’m driving around town, I see film production sets film and tv production.
In Atlanta healthcare is also big business. In fact, four of our top ten employers in Atlanta are in the healthcare sector. Right now all of these hospitals are aggressively recruiting doctors and nurses and they’re paying big signing bonuses. So, if you’re looking for great job opportunities Atlanta is the place to be.
Pro number five: the weather! The weather here is really enjoyable – for most of the year it gets a hot in July and August, and gets a little cold in January. But for most of the year, the weather’s pretty fantastic. It’s very easy to get outside and do outdoor activities pretty much year round.
Pro number six: there’s lots of things to do in Atlanta. As I said the great weather makes it very easy to get outside and enjoy yourself whether you like hiking, biking, tennis, golf. You can do those activities pretty much year round. The Chattahoochee River is a great recreational resource. We love to go tubing there every summer, and one of our other favorite things to do is to visit what we call dog island, where all the dog owners bring their pups to splash around and play in the river.
If you’re a gardening aficionado, you’re going to love the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. They have an indoor rain forest, an orchid house, they have a chef’s kitchen, an edible garden and a children’s garden. They have sculptures made out of plants – it’s really a wonderful place. If you’re into gardening and you’re into plants you’ve got to go to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens.
If you’d like to stay busy, whether you like professional sports leagues, sports, the opera, art museums, art festivals, the symphony, swimming, fishing, music and small clubs or large arenas, Atlanta is filled with great cultural activities. Add to that thousands of restaurants serving every kind of cuisine imaginable and I promise you you will not be hungry or bored living in Atlanta.
And finally pro number seven: the green space. One thing you’ll notice when you see images of Georgia is that there are trees everywhere. Atlanta is a big city in an enormous forest and the city hasn’t scared off the wildlife. My backyard is like a nature special on PBS there’s bunny rabbits and foxes possums and dozens of birds including hawks and falcons – which is why we have the Atlanta hawks and the Atlanta falcons. The trees give us some great colors in the fall.
So now let’s talk about our cons. Fortunately there aren’t many cons to living in Atlanta, but I’m going to go ahead and give them to you here.
Con number one the traffic. Atlanta is notorious for having some of the worst traffic in the United States. I always tell people if you’re moving to Atlanta you really need to get a home close to where you work. I will say one thing that has improved traffic in Atlanta is the new work from home paradigm it’s really taken a good chunk of cars off the road and I think it’s made a big improvement and hopefully it will continue. But again if you’re moving to Atlanta the number one thing you can do to improve your quality of life is to live reasonably close to where you work.
Con number two: lack of mass transit. This goes hand in hand with Atlanta’s traffic problems. Atlanta’s mass transit system is called MARTA and to be honest it kind of sucks. Unfortunately MARTA wasn’t very well designed to begin with- it uses a very large rail which requires excessively large stations unlike the lighter platforms that you see in Chicago and New York City. It also doesn’t cover much area, in fact many of the stations on the north side you actually have to drive to get to the station, which kind of defeats the point of mass transit. Atlanta is very spread out geographically and MARTA just doesn’t cover much area. So if you’re planning on making a move to Atlanta and you’re thinking you want to use mass transit, you really need to do your homework and make sure it’s going to be a viable solution for you.
Con number three: the rain. As nice as the weather is most of the year, sometimes it can start raining and you honestly wonder if it’s ever going to stop. Atlanta actually gets much more rain than even a notoriously rainy city like Seattle. Seattle for instance averages 38 inches of rain every year Atlanta actually averages 50 inches of rain. The difference is in Seattle, it’s rainy and drizzly all the time. In Atlanta the thunderstorms pop up and you get these incredible downpours. I can’t tell you how many times i’ve been on the highway and had to pull off because I just simply couldn’t see 10 feet in front of my car because of all the rain.
I hope this gives you a little bit more insight what it’s like to live in Atlanta. It’s a lovely town – friendly people, great cultural activities, so much to do, wonderful weather. It’s just a terrific all-around place to live.
Hey, it’s Parker your favorite Atlanta REALTOR! If you’ve been thinking about making the move to Atlanta, you may be wondering about job opportunities! So today I wanted to showcase some of the excellent job opportunities we have in Atlanta.
Now I’m going to primarily showcase health care and technology, but I want you to think about all of the other downstream opportunities that are created by these large investments these companies are making. Before we get started, if you want to know anything about the Atlanta business climate, I highly recommend that you subscribe to the Atlanta Business Chronicle. It’s the one newspaper I read every day, and it’s a terrific source for information about all the opportunities available in Atlanta.
All right, let’s get going! Now I’m not going to get too far down in the weeds with each of these, I just wanted to give you a high level overview, give you some ideas about where you might find employment in Atlanta.
Microsoft is continuing to bet big in Atlanta. They are buying up some very significant pieces of land, both inside the perimeter on Atlanta’s west side, and also in some of the outlying suburbs. The plan is for Atlanta to be their east coast headquarters, and according to this article, it is possible they might create as many as 10,000 jobs.
Visa is expanding their midtown Atlanta footprint, and could bring in as many as a thousand new jobs. Innovative Surgical makes robotic tools for minimally invasive surgeries – they’re planning a 1,200 employee expansion with jobs in medical training, manufacturing, engineering, administration. Innovative Surgical is located in Peachtree Corners, which is northeast of Atlanta, outside the perimeter. It’s a very nice community up there.
Our last tech insight is that of our own homegrown email marketing company: Mailchimp just sold to Intuit for a cool 12 billion dollars!Mailchimp is moving their offices to a new location while they merge with Intuit, and they’re hiring a bunch of new people to help merge the two products, so that should be really an exciting development!
Let’s look at our hospital systems, and see what they’re up to. There are major employment opportunities in Atlanta’s healthcare systems: Emory Hospital is currently building a one billion dollar medical complex at North Druid Hills Road and I-85 right. Across the street, Children’s Healthcare is investing one and a half billion dollars into what I’ve heard will be the fourth or fifth largest hospital complex in the United States. Northside Hospital Gwinnett is building a 400 million dollar patient tower in Lawrenceville. Lawrenceville is in Gwinnett county, and the growth up there has been absolutely explosive. It is on track, I think in the next five years to be the largest county by population in the Atlanta metro area. Wellstar Health System is spending 263 million on a new tower in Marietta. All told this is over three billion dollars in new health care investments by hospitals that are already some of Atlanta’s largest employers.
Emory is Atlanta’s number one employer. Northside Hospital is number three on the list. Wellstar Healthcare and Piedmont Hospital come in at number six and seven, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is Atlanta’s 12th largest employer. So when these multi-billion dollar projects are happening in health care and technology, it’s not just good news if you happen to be in it or a doctor or a nurse – it’s good news if you have any skill set. Whether you work in transportation, whether you are an electrician, plumber, if you’re in logistics supply chain management, administration. It creates so many opportunities – it’s like ripples in a pond.
So keep your eyes out – pay attention, you know get that subscription to the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Read it every week, because there are always great ideas about where you can find employment in Atlanta. So if you’re thinking of making the move to Atlanta, as always my number’s in the box down below. Feel free to give me a call – I talk to people every week – a lot of people lately from California, New York. I talk to people every week that are planning on making their moves to Atlanta. Some are coming next month, some are coming three months, six months, but it’s never too early to start having that conversation: learning about the great neighborhoods around Atlanta, figuring out where you want to live. Make your plans – make your move!
https://youtu.be/s2aI5YeFqS8
Hey, this is Parker, your favorite Atlanta REALTOR. It has been a very busy few weeks for me in Atlanta, and we are definitely overdue for a new video! So, I wanted to share some quick on the ground updates about what’s going on in the Atlanta market right now. Let’s get going!
The last few weeks, I’ve had a bunch of buyers in town, and I have been all over Atlanta looking at houses. Everywhere from Midtown all the way up to Milton, Roswell, Sandy Springs, Alpharetta, and Lawrenceville. I’ve been everywhere – I can tell you right now, there are so many houses on the market in Atlanta, that have been waiting for a buyer. These are houses that have been on the market three, four, five weeks, and they’re just waiting for a good buyer. These are houses that last spring would have sold in one weekend with multiple offers. Now they’re on the market for a month, generating one offer!
So things have softened up considerably here. I’m definitely not going to say that it’s a buyer’s market by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels very balanced right now, and things are operating at a much more normal pace. So, for example, I was out with clients last week – we were looking in town, looking at city of Decatur, and we looked at five houses, and actually came away with three really good choices that were priced very reasonably – three excellent options out of five houses that we looked at. It’s very surprising, I mean it’s probably been 17 or 18 months since I’ve seen that kind of availability, and I’m seeing this trend everywhere. It’s not just in town, like I said, Sandy Springs, Roswell, Alpharetta, Lawrenceville – it’s everywhere!
So, if you got totally spooked by all the panic buying last spring, I can assure you that is over. It’s a much more normal market now. It’s brisk, it’s very busy, but it’s not out of control – like roller coaster careening down the tracks wheels about to fall off kind of insanity, which is what it was like in the spring.
So if you’re thinking of making the move to Atlanta, now is an excellent time to be looking. I always encourage people to look in the fall – it’s an excellent time to go out and pick up some bargains. If you’re in the market, as always my phone number is down below. Feel free to give me a call, and we’ll have some more video content out later this week – thanks!