Cobb 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. In a June post, we showcased a new housing dashboard for Forsyth County built in the Python framework Streamlit (and another for Fulton County in early August). We have created a sister dashboard in the same style, this time for Cobb County.

As before, the dashboard leverages data from the county’s Qpublic open records database which we have collected, geocoded, and aggregated to a custom geography level. The geographies shown closely mirror our proprietary “Super District” geography, which are groupings of Census tracts. They approximate city- and region-sized sections of the county for more granular analysis.

The dashboard below features an expandable left-hand side panel with data filters for transaction time frame and city/region (unlike previous editions, this dashboard does not feature a filter for construction vintage due to limitations of the data). Depending on your screen size, you may need to scroll down to see the entire embedded dashboard. Darker shades of city/regions correspond to higher median sales price per square foot. In addition to the embedded dashboard below, you can access the standalone dashboard app here.

Dashboard

Findings

Here are a few pertinent findings highlighted by the dashboard:

From 2018 to 2023:
- Nearly 80,000 homes sold countywide;
- the overall median sales price during this time period was $327,500;
- the median sale price per square foot rose 61.9%;
Compare these figures to the smaller and more recent timeframe of 2021 to 2023, where we find that:
- 34,483 homes sold countywide;
- the overall median sales price rose to $380,000;
- the median sale price per square foot featured a more moderate increase of 20.0%.
The portions of the county closest to Fulton County consistently featured higher home sale prices than those further away, which isn’t too surprising.
- However, note that the contiguous regions of Smyrna/Vinings and Mabelton both border on Fulton County but range widely in the median home prices / SF. Since the onset of the pandemic, homes in the Mabelton area have sold for $172 / SF, while those in the Smyrna/Vinings area have sold for median price of $221 / SF, an increase in median price of nearly 30%.
Homes sold in the regions of Marietta, South Marietta, and West Marietta saw a slight decline in size (measured in SF) when comparing pre-pandemic and post-pandemic transactions.
- From 2018-2020, a total of 9,538 homes sold in these 3 regions at a median size of 1,944 square feet. From 2020-2023, a total of 10,585 homes sold for a median size of 1,887 square feet.
- This trend follows the entire county, as homes sold pre-pandemic featured a median size of 2,011 square feet, while the median home sold post-pandemic in the county featured a size of 1,964 square feet.
- However, as Cobb County does not provide data on the year of construction, we cannot say if most of these homes have been of a newer or older construction vintage.