by Parker

ATLANTA CLIMATE – DOES IT SNOW IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA?

Hey – it’s Parker your favorite Atlanta Realtor! I’m here to answer the question:  does Georgia have four seasons? Is hot Atlanta really hot all year long? Well i’m about to give you a taste of what the weather is like in Atlanta, Georgia.

 

Let’s get going! Atlanta, unlike Chicago, for example, doesn’t have a strict four seasons. We have a lot of unseasonably warm days in the winter, and we have a lot of very nice cool days in the summer. I like to say that we have endless spring, a very short summer, then endless fall and a very short winter.  And then it’s back to endless spring!

Winter most years – there’s not much of a winter in Atlanta.  It may start to get cold mid-December, or it may not.  January is usually our coldest month, and honestly, by February, you usually start to see daffodils poking out of the ground. Most winters in Atlanta don’t even require a heavy coat! Most years you can get by with just sweaters or a light jacket or a puffy vest. I mean it just really doesn’t get that cold in Atlanta.

Again, we don’t get snow every year and most years if we get snow it’s just a very light dusting, but every five years or so, we get a major snowstorm that comes into Atlanta.

The most recent time this happened was back in 2014 in the humiliating episode known as Snowpocalypse. Let me tell you about Snowpocalypse:  late in January 2014 we had some sub-freezing weather and it began to snow heavily. This is rare in Atlanta, it actually started to stick very heavily especially on the roads. It was the middle of the day, and the schools decided to send the kids home early, then all the businesses told their employees to head home, and within hours we had a classic Atlanta highway traffic jam in the middle of a 20-year snowstorm!!!

There were over 800 traffic accidents! People were stranded in their cars, or at work. People ended up sleeping on their desks and on the floors in grocery stores, and because of this debacle, lots of people made fun of Atlanta – even Saturday night live took a few digs at us!

We also get these incredible ice storms where we get freezing rain that sticks to all of the power lines and the tree branches, and it can knock the power out for days on end. So anytime snow or ice is predicted, everyone freaks out and buys up all the milk and bread and all the beer. But again, most winters don’t see anything more than a light dusting of snow. It’s just not that cold here!

The good news is spring is always right around the corner in Atlanta, and when it arrives it seems to last forever. In mid-January, the camellias start to bloom, and over the next four or five months, it’s just this endless unfolding of beautiful flowers and plants and all of our wonderful trees. It’s a gorgeous time to be in Atlanta.

The only thing wrong with spring in Atlanta is the pollen! If you have pollen allergies, Atlanta can be a rough ride! During spring pollen season, we have days where the trees are just pumping out so much pollen it blows around in huge yellow clouds. But other than the pollen, spring in Atlanta is de lovely.

If you like what we’re doing here, please like, comment and subscribe – preferably all three! Let’s get back to it! Unfortunately, spring always comes to an end, and then it’s summer! And it’s hot most summer days! It can be in the high 80s to low 90s, and it can very occasionally get up into the 100s! Add to that 65-70% humidity, and it gets sticky real fast!!!

Now, all this heat and humidity ends up driving these incredible summer afternoon thunder showers. If you come from an arid climate where it just doesn’t rain much, you may never have seen rain like it rains in Georgia! These thunderstorms usually blow out pretty quickly and they can actually turn a 90 plus degree day into a very very cool evening. The rain just pours down out of the sky and just washes away the heat. You’ve heard the old saying it’s not the heat it’s the humidity? Well, what we experience as heat most of the time in Atlanta is actually just excess humidity. Yesterday was August 8th, I was out with my dog in the middle of the day, and the weather was perfect! I checked the humidity and it was only 53 percent. Two hours later, I was getting ready to play tennis, and it was a total sweat box – very muggy, and I checked again, and the temperature had actually dropped a couple of degrees, but the humidity had gone up to 57%! I honestly had no idea that such a small increase in the humidity could have such a dramatic effect, and the crazy thing was it happened in two hours! It went from being very pleasant and very dry feeling, to all the sudden, very very muggy! And it was only a four percent increase in the humidity!!! I always say that Atlanta is hot but it’s not Florida hot! If you’ve ever been to Florida, you know how suffocating it can get with the heat and the humidity down there! So, by comparison, Atlanta’s just not that hot!

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 by Parker

BEST STATE TO RETIRE 2021???? WHAT IS ONE OF THE BEST STATES TO RETIRE TAX WISE? MOVING TO GEORGIA.

Hey, this is Parker your favorite Atlanta realtor! If you’ve considered moving to Georgia to retire, well there’s great news! Bankrate.com has just chosen Georgia as its best state to retire to in the year 2021. So, why is Georgia such a great place to retire? Give me three minutes and I’ll tell you why!

For starters, homes are still very affordable in Georgia, and in terms of cost of living, Georgia actually has the sixth lowest cost of living of any state. Georgia’s cost of living index, which covers groceries, housing, utilities, transportation and health care is 89.2. For comparison, California has the highest cost of living index in the continental U.S. at 151.

Georgia also has a very low personal income tax rate, although it’s not quite as low as our neighbors to the north in Tennessee and to the south in Florida. If you’re over 62, Georgia also exempts social security income and pension payments from income tax, so that lightens the tax burden even more. Many of our counties exempt people over 65 from the educational portion of their property tax bill, which is obviously the largest chunk of your property taxes. So, you’re getting a very nice discount not only on your income taxes, but also on your property taxes.

One of my favorite things about the state of Georgia, and something that will surely appeal to any retiree is the incredibly broad range of geography we have in the state. In North Georgia, we have the cool beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, with hundreds of waterfalls and endless hiking trails, and in the southeast part of the state, we have Savannah, Georgia – one of the crown jewels of American cities, and some of the loveliest coastlines anywhere along the Atlantic coast.

if you’d like to find out more about the North Georgia mountains and the Georgia coast check out my video here. If you love lake life, Georgia is a great place to be, and we currently have over 7,000 miles of lakefront shoreline. So, if you’ve dreamed of retiring and living on the lake, Georgia is where you want to be!

Now, while our biggest cities Atlanta, Augusta and Savannah have steadily gotten more expensive over the last 10 years, they’re still very affordable relative to most major metropolitan areas around the country. If you’re interested in a small farm or a parcel of land, you can find these you know 45 minutes to an hour from all of our biggest cities and pick it up for peanuts.

So, you can buy a home, you can buy a farm, you can buy some acreage and stay very close to your kids, stay close to your grandkids. In fact, many of the people i’ve worked with over the past couple of years have been what we call trailing grandparents. There are people who are moving to Georgia to stay close to their kids and their grandkids. So it’s a very nice trend to see, and i’m sure if that’s what’s on your mind you’re gonna love it! So, if you’re thinking about making the move to the state of Georgia to be close to the kids or the grandkids or maybe to get away from the kids and the grandkids, feel free to reach out to me give me a call i’d love to talk to you thanks!

 

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 by Parker

ATLANTA HOUSING MARKET 2021 – ATLANTA REAL ESTATE NEWS SUMMER 2021

Hey this is Parker Smith – your favorite Atlanta realtor!

Here’s a quick Atlanta real estate market update for July 2021. I had a feeling at the end of May, beginning of June that the market was starting to loosen up a little bit. Additional inventory was coming on to the market, and indeed when i reviewed the numbers for June inventory was up 14. That’s huge!

So what does that mean for buyers? It means that the inventory crisis, which has been going on for over a year, has started to abate. And, this is very good news for buyers! Let’s take a quick look at some maps here that are going to illustrate this for you. This first map shows a two mile radius in North Decatur, a very popular in-town neighborhood, and this is the total number of houses that have sold in the last six months:  323. These are closed listings done deals –  323 houses.

What’s interesting is that today in the middle of July, there are almost 80 houses on the market in that exact same area. Let me show you – you can see on this map there’s almost 80 listings on the market, and what this means is that today alone, there is 25 of the total inventory that was available in the first half of the year on the market right now looking for a buyer. That’s a significant improvement. Here’s one more map that shows pending sales. These are homes that have cleared their due diligence, and are set to close typically in the next few weeks. This is another 60 houses, so if you add that to the 80 active listings, we get about 44 percent of the previous six months total either active or ready to close.

This is an incredible turnaround for the Atlanta real estate market, and it’s made things much more balanced for buyers. Homes are staying on the market longer with fewer bidding wars. I don’t want to say that the inventory problems are over because they certainly aren’t, but the end of covid has definitely made people a lot more comfortable having their house on the market, having strangers walking through their house.

It looks like prices are starting to stabilize, businesses are relocating their employees again, so all of this is a very positive development if you’re a buyer, and frankly it’s a positive development if you’re a seller as well. So if you were considering a move to Atlanta, but were frightened off by all the negative talk about the Atlanta market, I think you can put your fears to rest. Things are definitely getting back to normal, and it’s very nice to see kind of after the last year of total madness. As always, if you’re thinking about making the move to Atlanta please give me a call my number’s in the box below love to talk to you thanks!

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 by Parker

MOVING TO ATLANTA | COMPANIES HIRING IN ATLANTA

Hey, this is Parker, your favorite Atlanta realtor. Today I’m going to talk about some of the great job opportunities in Atlanta. I’m going to be referencing a lot of articles in the Atlanta Business Chronicle. I want to give them a shout out – it’s a great publication we subscribe to, and there’s always terrific information in there about the job market, the biggest companies, everything else you need to know to get a good job here.

So let me start by saying if you’re going to move to Atlanta, the number one thing you need to have is a job in Atlanta. The cool thing is, if you can secure a job offer letter from a new employer, say a job starting July 1st, my lenders can actually close on a home in June! So you can move to Atlanta a month before your new job starts. Go ahead and close on your home, get moved in, get settled down and then get ready for your new job.

 

 

I’m going to do another video on this coming up in a few weeks and getting more in depth into that topic, but i just wanted to put that out there and make you aware of it.

First up in our job opportunities:  if you are in information technology, computer science, software development, Microsoft is all in on making Atlanta their east coast center. Microsoft recently bought 90 acres of land near the Bankhead MARTA station, which is on the west side of Atlanta. The plan is to create a new campus there, and also set aside 25 acres for affordable housing. In addition to that, Microsoft has purchased another 125 acres near East Point, which is right next to the Atlanta Airport, and they have another 90 acre site that they’re developing out in Douglas county, which is far west Atlanta, and they have another site in Palmetto for a 250,000 square foot data center. Palmetto is a really interesting little city southwest of Atlanta – it’s the home of Serenbe, which is a planned farm to table sustainable living community, and it’s also one of the principal filming sites for stranger things the Bradley’s Big Buy grocery store in stranger things is actually an old Piggly Wiggly on Center Street in Palmetto, and they use a lot of the neighborhoods around there to film exterior locations as well.  So, again, Microsoft is all in on making Atlanta their east coast data center. It’s going to be really interesting to watch the west side of Atlanta develop as this process unfolds. They’re going to be tens of thousands of jobs created and the west side of Atlanta has traditionally been underdeveloped relative to the east side, and when I say under developed, what I mean is that there just hasn’t been that the same housing density on the west side that you see on the east side. It’s going to be a really interesting process to watch right now. There’s just billions of dollars of investment capital flowing into the west side and you know it’s it’s going to be a very exciting time. If you like what we’re doing here please like comment and subscribe thanks.

All right second opportunity:  you probably know that more films are produced in Georgia now than in Hollywood, and that’s brought incredible opportunities in the film and tv business, not just in Atlanta, but all over the state of Georgia. One of the reasons Georgia has become so popular is we have mountains in the north part of the state, we have plains down in the southwest part of the state, and we have the beautiful Georgia coast in the southeast, and you know as a filmmaker that gives you access to all these really visually different geographic locations and they’re all just a few hours apart. Georgia also has about 2 million square feet of soundstage production space, and that number is growing very very fast. One of the most exciting developments in film and tv right now in Georgia is that Gray Television has bought the old General Motors plant in Doraville, and they’re converting it into a film and television production hub. Doraville, if you don’t know, is a small city just northeast of Atlanta inside the perimeter. The General Motors plant opened in 1947, and it closed in 2008. It sat there for a few years. They finally demolished it in 2015, and it’s just been a giant heap of concrete rubble ever since. Various plans have floated around over the years for this old General Motors site, and this is the first one that it’s going to happen. Grey Television is planning a real Hollywood-style studio city development, with sound stages, restaurants, parks, a lake. There’s going to be little bungalows there where producers, directors, screenwriters, can all live and collaborate during production. This is a very exciting development! They’re breaking ground on the project this summer with plans to be operational by the spring of 2022. This is going to be an incredible boost for the city of Doraville but also for Chamblee, Brookhaven, and Dunwoody which are all adjacent to Doraville. So, if you’re working anywhere in the film and tv production industry, definitely give Atlanta a look. By the way if you like what we’re doing here I’m a licensed realtor in the state of Georgia please keep me in mind – my contact information is in the box below. You got any questions about Atlanta real estate anywhere in the state of Georgia, I’d love to talk to you.

Let’s keep going! And, our third and final opportunity for today’s video is SAIA trucking. If you have a commercial driver’s license, SAIA trucking is expanding their Atlanta facilities, and they’re hiring 500 class a commercial drivers. SAIA is the number eight transportation company in the United States. They’re offering up to a hundred thousand dollars a year for new drivers with signing bonuses, paid training, 401k retirement plans and paid time off. If you have a commercial driver’s license and you’re looking to make a move to Atlanta this would be a great opportunity.

So whether you work in tech, entertainment, healthcare, transportation, the arts, hospitality – Atlanta is absolutely booming right now and I think you’re going to find tremendous employment opportunities here. If you’re thinking about making the move to Atlanta, please keep me in mind I’m a licensed realtor. My contact information is in the box below – feel free to reach out to me with any questions you have we’ll talk soon!

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 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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