Fulton 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 recent June post, we showcased a new housing dashboard for Forsyth County built in the Python framework Streamlit. We have created a sister dashboard in the same style, this time for Fulton 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, construction vintage, and city/region. 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:
- Over 86,000 homes sold countywide;
- the overall median sales price during this time period was $379,900;
- the median sale price per square foot rose 55.7%;
Compare these figures to the smaller and more recent timeframe of 2021 to 2023, where we find that:
- 37,109 homes sold countywide;
- the overall median sales price rose to $415,000;
- the median sale price per square foot featured a more moderate increase of 20.6%.
Geography matters!
- Since 2020, homes in the South Fulton region feature a median construction vintage of 2008, a median size of 2,624 square feet, and a median sales price of $320,000.
- By contrast, and over the same time period, the Buckhead region sold smaller, older homes but at a median price double that of South Fulton: a whopping $675,000!
The collective north Fulton city/regions of Milton, Roswell, Johns Creek, and Alpharetta have seen somewhat stagnating sales prices since around June 2022.
- July 2022 saw the first decrease in median sale price / SF since July 2019, meaning the regions saw roughly 36 months straight of increasing (or at least stable) home sale prices.
- From 2018 to 2020, the collective median sale price of these regions was $437,225, while the median sales price since 2020 has been $528,350.
- The median home size sold pre-Covid (2018-2020) was slightly larger than the median size which has sold since 2021, a possible indication that people prefer less space to maintain in the Covid era for these regions.
If we extrude the county’s city/region geographies by toggling the 3D view (accessed in the side panel), we see that several regions quite literally tower over the rest, representing a high volume of sales since 2018: Roswell, Sandy Springs, Buckhead, NE Atlanta, and Shannon.
- However, the coloring of these regions tells a different story (keep in mind that the darker shading is representative of a greater median sales price / SF). In this regard, Buckhead and NE Atlanta feature median prices / SF north of $300.
- The fact that NE Atlanta features such a high volume of sales between 2018 and 2023 (over 9,000) and boasts a median sales price of over $450,000 (a staggering $342 / SF) speaks to the strong demand for housing in this close-in neighborhood of Fulton County.