by Parker

ATLANTA HOUSING MARKET 2021 – ATLANTA REAL ESTATE NEWS SPRING 2021

Hey this is Parker, your favorite Atlanta realtor! Well, spring is in bloom and the Atlanta real estate market is in boom. Things are even wilder now than they were last year, and as we all know, 2020 was a pretty wild year.

Here’s a quick update in some trends I’ve noticed in the Atlanta real estate market. As I mentioned before, due to the high demand last year prices were up 10 to 14 percent across the board. Well, that has definitely continued this year, and it’s led to some very interesting trends.

 

 

 

First off is what I call anticipated price inflation. Generally when a home lists, the list price of that home is based upon recently sold comparable properties. I think that people are already anticipating another five to ten percent increase in prices this year, and they’re going ahead and factoring that into their offers.

Many houses are going under contract above the list price, so that makes it increasingly likely that the bank appraisal is going to come in below the offered price. Which means that you have to be willing to pay the difference in cash. So, if their appraisal comes in low, and they need to make a slightly smaller down payment in order to cover the difference, that seems to be fine with many buyers now.

This observation is actually based on some conversations I’ve had with some of my lenders. They have started seeing some of the appraisals coming in low, because so many people are bidding up the value of these homes. What will happen is as these houses close and people make up the difference with cash out of pocket what’s going to happen is those will become new comps and those will help support the price valuations. You know, two or three months down the road, the problem right now is that it’s happening so quickly that the comps just simply haven’t had time to catch up.

The second trend I’ve noticed is the number of listing agents who are just simply overwhelmed and cannot keep up. Most agents are great communicators, and that’s one of the areas you really need to shine in order to succeed in real estate. So, if you’re dealing with just one buyer on one home search or one home under contract that’s going to generate you know a very significant amount of text and emails and phone calls. These listing agents where they may have a few houses listed and they’re dealing with multiple offers flying in from all angles – I mean they’re literally dealing with you know hundreds of emails and texts and phone calls – it’s overwhelming, it really is. So I’ve noticed a significant decrease in people’s ability or willingness to respond to inquiries, and it’s been a big challenge for everyone. It’s one of those situations where you have to realize you know this is not the norm, and you have to try to really extend your patience and understanding.

One of the houses we recently wrote an offer on received 29 other offers, and ended up under contract for $24,000 over the asking price. I’ve spoken with many agents who’ve had 20 plus offers on all of their listings. One of the houses we wanted to see recently came on the market on a Thursday morning, which is when a lot of homes list, and by noon that day every available showing slot for that house for the next two days had been filled up!

The third trend I’ve noticed is agents going straight to highest and best. Most of them will say send us your highest and best offer by 8 pm on Sunday, and we’ll make our decision Monday morning. Now in normal times, most houses will typically generate just, you know, one or two offers. In certain situations where you have a very high demand property, a house might get you five, six, seven offers, and that’s when you say: hey send us your highest and best. What you’re doing is you’re letting all the people who’ve currently made an offer know that hey, we are in a multiple offer situation, and I need to see your highest and best offer by 8 pm on Sunday. This is a fairly effective strategy in multiple offer situations because it just lets everybody know, yeah there’s a lot of offers on the table, so just you know put out your best offer right away. We’re not going to go counter offer and go back and forth and negotiate all the details, just show us what you got right now, and we’ll consider it. It also saves a lot of back and forth on the part of the agents fielding phone calls saying: hey do you have any other offers? Yes we’ve got lots of other offers, so send us what you got.

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The fourth and final trend that I’m going to talk about today is that houses that formerly would have sat on the market going wanting for a buyer are now flying off the market. Two years ago houses had to be HGTV ready, I mean perfect in every aspect:  all the paint, the floor, kitchen cabinets, everything had to be perfect or people just kind of turned their noses up at them. I’m a big believer in the diamond in the rough properties – I love those little old lady houses that are well maintained, but you know need some paint, need some freshening up. I think there’s a tremendous amount of value there, and apparently everybody in the Atlanta market has now come around to my way of thinking, because these houses are not staying on the market anymore. Now people are beginning to see that location is more important than anything else. You can fix up an okay house in a good neighborhood, but you can’t take a bad neighborhood and turn it into a good neighborhood. You can’t lower your property taxes, you can’t double the size of your house – you just have to move somewhere else!

So here’s some data looking at March 2021 versus March of 2020:  there were 800 fewer listings this year than there were last year, and houses under contract were up 12% this year versus last year, which is another indication that those houses that used to sit on the market that just didn’t pass the sniff test 18 months ago, those houses are all selling very quickly. Now this isn’t to frighten you, I only want to inform people about what’s going on in the Atlanta market. Demand is very high, but you can still find a good house. If you’re planning on moving here, you’re definitely going to want to bring your patience, and you’re definitely going to need to prepare yourself to work hard and face some disappointments, but ultimately you’ll find the house you want. I had some clients and we’ve had some close calls recently, where you know, we were in a multiple offer situation, we didn’t get the house, but ultimately we found a house for them.

You know, a few weeks later, a month later, and what’s interesting is that all of those clients came back to me and they said, you know Parker we actually ended up with the best house we’re so glad we didn’t get that other house because we really feel like we got the best house for our family, and that’s really nice to hear, because sometimes as an agent you know you’re you’re doing your best, you’re working really hard and for whatever reason, you get beat out by a cash buyer. It’s kind of hard to compete with cash so it is really nice to hear back from these clients and say you know, what all that frustration it worked out in the end.

Another point to note is that the more money you have to spend, the less competition there is for a house. The median sales price in Atlanta is currently around three hundred thousand dollars, which means half of the houses are above $300k and half sell for below $300k. Obviously there are far more people that can afford a $250,000 house than can afford a $500,000 house, and when you get to six and seven hundred thousand dollars, the competition falls off dramatically. Far fewer people can afford the more expensive properties, so if you’ve got you know five or six hundred thousand dollars to spend, be comfortable in knowing that you’re probably going to find a great house fairly quickly.

So I hope you found that helpful! If you’re buying or selling anywhere in Atlanta or anywhere in the state of Georgia, my contact info is in the box below please feel free to give me a call, shoot me a text, send me an email – I’d love to work with you.

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 by Parker

Atlanta Real Estate Market | Moving to Atlanta? | First time home buyer?

I recently had a call from a woman in New Jersey who’s planning on moving to Atlanta, and her first question was, “Is there anything to buy?”

I keep hearing that the inventory is very, very low in Atlanta. Well, the good news is, there’s still plenty of houses being sold in Atlanta. Every single month, the bad news is inventory is kind of tight. I’m going to describe the reasons why that’s happening, and if you wait till the end of this video, I’m going to tell you why I think you can still find a great house in Atlanta!!!

 

 

Inventory is tight in Atlanta for three basic reasons: the first reason is people are moving out of the big cities and they’re moving down south to the sun belt states. This actually started well before Covid. The migration patterns were: people were leaving the big cities, they needed more space, they needed more freedom, they wanted to lower their cost of living. So, they were moving out of the big cities of the north and they’re moving down to the south.

You can see this chart from Wikipedia showing the domestic migration patterns 2018 to 2019. The sunbelt states are all gaining population, and the high cost of living states like New York and New Jersey and California are losing big numbers of people. Add to that, millennials have delayed purchasing homes, and many of them are entering the home buying market for the first time.

So, with the migration patterns and the entrance of millennials into the home buying market, all of those things have really worked to make demand sky high in Atlanta.

Reason number two:  the pandemic took the existing migration trend out of the big cities, and really stepped on the gas. That may have been fine, but at the same time demand was skyrocketing, supply was also falling. Let me tell you why:  imagine this if you’re a homeowner, and you’re considering selling. You might think, wow there’s all this excess demand, it’s a great time to sell, I can get top dollar for my house! But the reality is, you have to have some other place to go. If you sell your house now, and you want to move to North Georgia and retire in the mountains, that’s fine because there’s unlimited amounts of land in North Georgia. If you sell your house and your goal was to move down to Florida maybe a retirement community in Orlando, demand down there is sky high, it’s even worse than Atlanta.

So if you sell your house you’ve got to have some place to go, and in a pandemic environment, it might actually make sense to stay put for a while. So oddly enough, some of the excess buyer demand in Florida may be leading to the reduced supply of houses available in Atlanta.

Another aspect of this is just basic human nature. In times that are unsettled, people want to hold on to what they have. They want to have a little bit more stability, so they’re delaying the big changes like selling their house and moving somewhere else. Fortunately, life goes on.

Certain unavoidable life changes – you get a new job, you get relocated to a new city, you have to sell your house! Some people are living in a small house – they have children, they need to move to a bigger house! Some people are downsizing because their children are all off at college. Some people go into a retirement home. So life goes on – it’s just been kind of set off kilter by the pandemic.

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The third reason for tight inventory in Atlanta is the historically low interest rates. Interest rates have been very, very low for the last year and a half, two years now, and for a certain period of time last year they were just insanely low – like two and a half percent. You know nobody’s ever seen that.

That’s brought a lot of people into the home buying market that normally would not be buying a home, and so it’s created a lot of excess demand. Fortunately, the rates ticked up about a half a point a few weeks ago, and I think that’s going to just cool things off a bit, take some marginal home buyers out of the market, and reduce the demand.

The good news is that home prices in Atlanta were only up about 10% in the year 2020. That sounds like a lot but, the national average was closer to 15%, so Atlanta took a bump, but it’s not as big as many of the other places in the country.

The cost of living in Atlanta is also lower than many other big cities so, if you’re moving here from out of state, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised how much house you can afford.

You know, one of the reasons I think you’ll still be able to find a great house in Atlanta is that Atlanta is very large. It’s very spread out – there are no geographic boundaries that constrain the size of Atlanta. It’s not a tiny island where only a few houses can be built – there are literally hundreds of thousands of houses in Atlanta. The highest demand areas are inside the perimeter, so a lot of the communities outside the perimeter such as Tucker, Lawrenceville and Lilburn are much more affordable.

So i’ll say this – there’s a good home for you in Atlanta if you’re interested in moving here. There again are hundreds of thousands of houses here – there are communities all over the city where you can find affordable houses, and it’s really about finding a home that fits your lifestyle and your budget. So, despite all the craziness over the last year, I think you can still find an affordable house in Atlanta. I hope this has been helpful! If you’re thinking about making the move here give me a call!

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 by Parker

Moving to Atlanta? Living in Atlanta Ga – 5 things I hate about Atlanta.

Hey everyone it’s Parker your favorite Atlanta realtor, and today i’m going to tell you the five things I hate about Atlanta. Welcome to my channel, which is where I share information about moving to Atlanta, about having fun in Atlanta, and insider information about how things really work in Atlanta.

Let’s get going the number one thing I hate about Atlanta is the pollen. Atlanta is the city of trees and every spring those trees make unbelievable amounts of pollen. If you have pollen allergies, you may want to think twice before moving to Atlanta. At the peak of spring pollen season, you can watch the pine trees and literally see clouds of pollen blowing out. It covers your car in a thick layer – if you have a black car, you might as well go ahead and sell it and get something silver or gold, because all it does is show off the pollen. Even for those of us who don’t have allergies if you get a few days without rain to wash the pollen down you can really start to feel the symptoms of hay fever. Pollen season is a big old mess in Atlanta.

Another downside of all these trees is the sap that comes out of the oaks in the spring – you’ll get in your car and you’ll see on your windshield like there’s this fine mist and then you turn on your windshield wipers to try to clean it all off and it’s like maple syrup just being smeared across your windshield. It’s bad! And, the oak trees make tremendous amounts of these little seed tassels in the spring and in the fall. I mean there’s just billions of pounds of leaves and all of that ends up on your roof. If you don’t clean that off, it’ll rot your roof it’ll get down in your gutters, it’ll clog your gutters, rot out your soffits – it does create a significant amount of home maintenance.

Now those gripes being set aside, I actually love all the trees in Atlanta. I could never live out west and if you’re coming from New Mexico or Texas or one of these arid climates where they don’t have any trees, it’s actually astonishing when you get to Atlanta and you see it’s a forest. It’s a gigantic forest!

Number two of the things I hate about Atlanta: ice storms!!! Atlanta has these incredible ice storms where freezing rain falls from the skies for hours on end, it piles up on the power lines, on the tree branches, all of that gets dragged down and your power’s out for the next three days! Back in 2014, Atlanta experienced what has come to be known as Snowpocalypse. Some people call it Snowmageddon, but i really prefer Snowpocalypse.

Now this will all seem quite amusing if you’re from the north, but here’s the nutshell version of what happened in Snowpocalypse. Late in January 2014, we had several days of sub-freezing weather, and on a Friday, it started to snow very heavily and started to stick to the roads, which is very, very rare in Atlanta. It was the middle of the day, and the schools all said, hey let’s send the kids home, and so everybody that’s at work who had kids had to head home to get their kids, and the bosses said, hey it looks like it’s starting to stick, why don’t we just send everybody home? So you had a classic Atlanta traffic jam combined with a ton of snow!!!  There were 800 traffic accidents that day people – ended up sleeping in their cars, people ended up sleeping at work, people ended up abandoning their cars on the side of the highway and just getting out and trying to walk home. It was a total mess, and then what happened is over the next several days it was still right around freezing, it got just enough above freezing that the snow melted a little bit and then overnight it froze super hard again and two days later this entire town was glazed with ice. It was five days before you could go anywhere on the roads, so it’s not so much that Atlanta gets snow and gets ice like every other state, it’s that it happens so infrequently that we’re just really not prepared to handle it.

We saw what happened in Texas just last week –  they had a major storm move in, everybody lost power, they’re freezing in their homes. Similar things have happened in Atlanta, so be prepared.

Number three – we have roaches!!! Not just any kind of roach, we have palmetto bugs – these giant freaking roaches – you’ll see them in your house and they’ll suddenly take flight and land on you and terrorize you. A few years ago I was having a dream that I had a roach on my face and I slapped my face in the middle of the night, and I said, oh that was funny I was dreaming I had a roach on my face, and I slapped myself. Well, I look in the bed next to me and there’s a dead roach!!! There was a roach on my face, and that’s what these roaches do, they’ll get on you, they’re not afraid of you.

Mosquitoes – okay, combined with the roaches, we have mosquitoes. Atlanta’s great I’d say 10 months out of the year, July and August roll around, forget it – tons of mosquitoes.

Black widows – now if they all look like ScarJo I wouldn’t mind, but these are real black widows. A couple of years ago my son’s teacher was reaching into her mailbox to get her mail out, and she got bit by a black widow in her own mailbox!!!! Another time my son had an old Bob the Builder hat that he loved to wear and it sat out in the yard for a few days, and he went out there and picked it up, and he was about to put it on his head, and he looked down, and there’s a giant black widow that had built a nest inside of his hat!!!  You’ve got to keep your eyes open!

We also have brown recluses or at least i think we have brown recluses. Honestly if I see a spider anywhere, I just kind of step on it and squish it.

Number four of the things I hate about Atlanta:  the wild animals!!! We have copperheads that have been making an appearance over the last several years. Snake bites have gone way up! We’ve been seeing a lot of these copperheads on the trails where we like to hike and bike and walk, and just last summer we went down to the new Peachtree Creek park, and my son wanted to go down and splash around in the water. Well my oldest son says Dad, there’s a snake there, and I look down and there’s a copperhead that’s as big around as a baseball bat!!!!  Just a huge snake sitting right there waiting to bite somebody!

Atlanta also has an increasing population of coyotes. Normally you don’t see them during the day, although the last few years it’s becoming more and more common. They do come out at night, and I gotta warn you if you have cats, you want to keep them indoors after dark. That’s not an exaggeration – this is for real!!! Coyotes love to go after cats, so keep them indoors.

And number five of the things I hate about Atlanta!!! I should have actually made this number one, I should have done these in reverse order, but number five –  we’ll say five is the greatest, the most hated thing in Atlanta. You probably know the traffic here is awful, but the thing I hate the most about it is that they never stop working on the roads. You’re always out trying to get somewhere, and they’ve always got a road closed because they’re trying to improve the roads, but their improvements never actually make anything better!!! Up in Sandy Springs, which is one of the busiest parts of Atlanta, they have been working on the I-285 perimeter interchange with Georgia 400 since 2017!!!! Back in October, after nearly three years of work, they finally opened one section of the new road! So my advice to people moving to Atlanta is always know where your work is, and live very close to there you don’t want to spend a lot of time on the highways in Atlanta. So I hope you found that fun and informative if you’re making the move to Atlanta, please give me a call I’d love to talk to you, I’d love to help you find a house, Thanks!!!

 

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 by Parker

Is Atlanta a good place to live?

Is Atlanta a good place to live? I think so! I moved to Atlanta after college and have lived here ever since. I feel really lucky to live in Atlanta – It’s not the biggest city in America, but it’s big enough to have a lot of opportunities and things to do.

Atlanta is great if you love to travel. Most Atlantans probably take it for granted, but we are spoiled to have the busiest airport in the US in Atlanta. If you want to get out of town, you can get to pretty much anywhere non-stop. New York and Chicago are just a few hours away, you can get to Cancun and the Caribbean in a couple of hours, and you can get to London in 7 and Paris in 8!

Our great airport is part of what attracts companies to the Atlanta area. There are many Fortune 500 companies in Atlanta, such as Coca-Cola, UPS, Home Depot, Delta Airlines. Atlanta is also a growing tech hub.

Atlanta has become a technology hub as well, attracting established tech companies as well as start-ups to headquarter in Atlanta. Georgia Tech has a tech incubator program, which has been a big part of tech growth in Atlanta.

Atlanta also has a large film and tv industry.  Several years ago, the state of Georgia put a bunch of incentives in place to attract the film industry to Georgia. There’s a good chance that a tv show or movie that you’ve watched recently was filmed in Georgia. Two of the most popular tv shows, The Walking Dead and Stranger Things are filmed just outside Atlanta. If you happen to be in area that was a filming location, you will probably see a fan taking a selfie there!

What I also love about Atlanta is that it is large enough to attract lots of cultural events.

We have first-run Broadway plays at the FOX Theater. We’ve had Hamilton, Wicked and The Lion King come to Atlanta, just to name a few of the great shows you can see.

Atlanta also has a fine Art museum, the High museum, which attracts major art exhibits.

We have one of the largest botanical gardens in the southeast, The Atlanta Botanical Gardens. The gardens have a glass conservatory with rainforest and desert gardens, a rose garden, a newly renovated children’s garden and a kitchen garden where chef’s give cooking demonstrations. It’s a really fun place to spend an afternoon.

Atlanta also has a great music scene, whether you like to see bands in small clubs, or large amphitheaters, Atlanta is usually on a bands tour list.

Also, Atlanta has major league teams for football, basketball, baseball and soccer. The Atlanta United is the most recent addition to Atlanta, but they have a rabid, enthusiastic fan base! During soccer season, you see Atlanta United banners hung all over the city! Also, college football is huge in Atlanta (and Georgia) We have 2 college football teams that have a big rivalry – University of Georgia and Georgia Tech – the UGA/Tech game is one of the biggest ones of the year!

One of the best things about Atlanta is that you can spend pretty much all year outdoors. Most years, you don’t even need to wear a heavy winter coat. You can usually get by with a light jacket or puffy vest. So that means, you can grill out all year, eat on restaurant patios all year, do things like bike and hike, and play tennis and golf all year. Seriously. You can play tennis all year. There is a USTA winter league and they play. It never gets too cold there than maybe once or twice a decade when we get an ice storm, but that’s about it for cold!

Another perk of Atlanta being a larger city is that we have great shopping! We have everything from high-end shopping such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Cartier to stores such as Zara, Top Shop and Ikea. Atlanta is a very food oriented city, and we have the grocery shopping to support it. If there is something exotic you want to buy you will find it in Atlanta! We have the big chains like Kroger and Publix, the smaller chains like TJs, Aldi and Lidl, as well as several large farmers markets where you can find things like dragon fruit, durian, cilantro and baby bok choi! If you love to cook or eat, Atlanta has the food for you!

Speaking about gourmet food, you may not know it, but Atlanta is the home of Coca-Cola, Chick-fil-A and Krispy Creme! That is a meal right there for you! For fun, you can take your family to the World of Coca-Cola museum, go to the Krispy Kreme on Piedmont Road and see the donuts being made, or you can eat at the original Chick-fil-A south of the city, near the airport.

In the end, I think the best thing about Atlanta is the people.

If you are looking for a safe, stable and affordable place to live, Atlanta has a lot to offer.

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