That was a quote from a neighbor as we were discussing my family’s move back to our home in Georgia after four months in North Carolina.
Here’s a brief background. I left the company I had been working for for nearly 8 years to seek other opportunities. I was looking for a company that was highly diversified in its locations and services but still had a “small” company feel to it. I found that company in W.K. Dickson – but the position was in Wilmington, North Carolina. Leaving a place like Atlanta was, of course, difficult. We have many friends and a lot of family in Atlanta. But we thought the change, for both my career and our family, would be an experience worth making a go of.
It turned out that it was, in fact, very positive from a career standpoint. W.K. Dickson was a great employer and I was learning a lot in my new surroundings and from the great people I was working with. With around 200 employees and 8 offices across the southeast, it naturally had a more corporate feel to it than I had in my previous work. It definitely took some getting used to, but it was a great learning experience. However, as the market continued to decline severely in Atlanta, our home sat on the market. We thought we had priced it reasonably to begin with after reviewing comparables. However, after about 45 days, we dropped the price by 10%. Unfortunately, foreclosures and new homes in the area made it nearly impossible to compete with. We decided to pull the house from the market after about 100 days and move back.
It’s turned out for the best because we love our home and our neighbors. We feel very fortunate to be where we are. But the experience was certainly interesting and an education. Wilmington’s average price for a “comparable” home was between 40 and 60 percent more expensive. While very nice homes in the Atlanta area can be had for under $100 per square foot, Wilmington homes were going for between $130 and $160 per square foot. And nobody has a basement in Wilmington because of its proximity to the coast. I think the example that best hit me between the eyes was a home built not far from us in 2005. It had 4,400 square feet of heated floor space and sold for $299,000 – or $68 (!!) per square foot.
The reason for this is quite simple – Wilmington has limited land and not even close to the inventory of homes (per capita) that Atlanta has. It also isn’t suffering from the same number of foreclosures for a number of reasons, chief among them being that Wilmington is both a retirement community and a college community. People who retire to the coast tend to either not have a mortgage, or have huge equity in their home. College students are renting – and more and more people are going to college – meaning people who own investment property there aren’t likely to lose the rental home because they have lots of potential tenants.
Anyway, getting back to the “There’s no place like Atlanta”, my neighbor and I were discussing these things and I said I still can’t believe how cheap housing in Atlanta is. My neighbor, who has moved several times all over the place, said, “There’s no place like Atlanta” when it comes to the cost of housing. I think he’s right too. Hopefully that will be what carries Atlanta, whose, like San Diego, economy was largely real estate based, but, unlike San Diego, is affordable – incredibly affordable. And reports are that it is even more affordable after a near 14% drop from prices this time last year.
Atlanta Skyline. From SPSU.edu.
It’s hard to guess where the market is going from here, particularly in the Atlanta area. The good news is that inventory for the previous 12 months is down almost 14% too. Right now, metro Atlanta is at around 102,000 homes. For a recovery to start taking place and for us to actually begin to see some small amount of growth, I think inventory needs to be reduced by at least another 15-20%. Hopefully we can do that in a year, like we did in the previous 12 months.
Atlanta is a great place to be, even for her warts like traffic, smog and water supply problems. It’s a really great place to raise a family and we’re happy to be back.
