Douglas County Housing Dashboard

We’ve got housing prices on our minds. Again.

Rising housing costs, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been well established. Prices for new and older homes alike have been steadily increasing in many parts of the country. Over the past few months, we have published blog posts showcasing dashboards for the following:

This new dashboard for Douglas County leverages data from the county’s Qpublic public records database which we have collected, geocoded, and aggregated to the Census tract level.

The dashboard (built for desktop, not mobile screens) can be accessed here, and we have included a screenshot of the dashboard below. It features an expandable left-hand side panel with a toggle for the dashboard variable: total sales, median price per square foot, and median overall price. Sidebar sliders allow filtering for transaction time frame, construction vintage of the home, and city/region:

Findings

Here are a few pertinent findings highlighted by the dashboard:

From 2018 to 2023:
- 13,815 homes sold countywide;
- the overall median sales price countywide during this time period was $229,900, while the median price per square foot was roughly $121.
- the median sale price per square foot rose 78.2%, although much of this increase occurred since the summer of 2021.
The peak price per square foot occurred in the most recent month of available data (May 2023) with a countywide median of $189.
- This median price dipped in Q3 of 2022 but began slowly climbing towards the end of 2022
Since the onset of the pandemic (i.e., 2020 – present):
- Over 8,700 homes have sold countywide;
- the overall median sales price was $256,000;
- the median sale price per square foot was roughly $140 and rose by 53.5%.
Homes sold in just the Douglasville sub-geography (Census tracts in the north-central portion of the county) from 2018 to 2023 featured a median vintage of 1991.
- Since only the onset of the pandemic, most of the homes of new construction vintage (built since 2011) have sold in the Census tract southeast of the downtown area (13-097-080607), where a total of 94 such homes have sold.
- Isolating just homes built since 2000 in the Douglasville market (867 in total), the median price per square foot has risen since 2020 to the present, at a total change of 43.0% over that time frame.
When toggling on the 3D view of the map and expanding the sidebar sliders to include all sale years but only homes built since 2000, we find that one Census tract in particular has experienced an extraordinary amount of market activity compared to the rest of the county: 13-097-080407 in the northwest.
- This Census tract is part of the Villa Rica sub-geography and has seen a staggering 685 housing transactions over the time period covered, but the median sales price per square foot is only about $112, which is appreciably lower than the 3 Census tracts immediately south which feature median sales prices of between roughly $135 and $145 per square foot.
- When expanding all sidebar sliders to include all sales, we find that the Census tract furthest south (13-097-080406) features the highest median sales price per square foot in the county at nearly $144. This is about 19% higher than the countywide median price over the course of 2018 through 2023.