In east Cobb, Page Morgan of Re/Max Greater Atlanta said houses are moving, if slowly.

"I'm working twice as hard to keep up the same production as last year," said Morgan.

Andy Sharp/AJC (ENLARGE)

Real estate agent Page Morgan shows a home in the Indian Hills neighborhood to first-time home buyer David Crews, 25.

Andy Sharp/AJC (ENLARGE)

Crews, an Army veteran and recent Georgia Southern graduate, looked at several homes in Indian Hills in Cobb County where home sales are moving just a bit slower than previous years.

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It's a buyer's market in Cobb.

Sales of new and used homes dropped more than 20.2 percent in Cobb County in 2007. Still, overall prices eked up 1.3 percent.

Steve Palm of the SmartNumbers real estate research firm said sales of new homes in Cobb fell from 4,125 in 2006 to 3,090 last year, a 25.1 percent decline. Resales were down 18.5 percent in the same period, from 11,467 to 9,350.

Median prices of new homes in Cobb rose 4 percent, from $294,822 to $306,620, while resales fell 1.1 percent, from $188,000 to $186,000, according to data from SmartNumbers for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's 2008 Home Sales Report.

In adjacent Cherokee County, new home sales dropped 27.1 percent, from 3,214 to 2,344 last year, and resales declined from 3,434 to 2,777, a 19.1 percent drop, according to the report. Median prices for new homes in fast-growing Cherokee rose from $244,950 to $250,000, or 2.1 percent, while resale prices edged up from $182,000 to $187,000, or 2.7 percent.

"People are reluctant to buy," said Don Sabbarese, director of the econometric center at Kennesaw State University. "They think prices will go down further. The banks are certainly increasing their credit standards. People who might have qualified in '06 and early '07 may not now."

The main bright spot, Sabbarese said, is that metro Atlanta is doing better than places like Las Vegas and a number of cities in Florida.

Ernie DiRico, a long-time Atlanta real estate expert, said "unit sales declined in almost every ZIP code in Cobb and Cherokee counties. Closings are down dramatically, but they are not down as much as starts are down."

"Things are down this year compared to the same time last year," said Rob Hosack, Cobb community development director. "We're off upwards of 50 percent, maybe 65 percent."

Sabbarese said people are being highly selective, looking at factors like quality of schools, drive time to downtown, available land to be developed.

"... In an area like Smyrna, the new homes being built are $100,000 to $200,000 higher in value than existing homes," he said. "That new mix of homes will drastically change the numbers that [the] data show."

He said the housing market will "probably hit bottom in the near future, but when it does it's going to be there for a while."

Total sales were down 21.2 percent in Fulton County, 16.3 percent in Forsyth and 29.6 percent in Gwinnett, according to the SmartNumbers data.

Every ZIP code in Cobb County except for two showed a drop in the number of sales from 2006 to 2007.

And three fourths of the ZIP code areas had lower sales numbers than in 2003.

Smyrna-Vinings, ZIP code 30339, fared best with a 22 percent increase in number of house sales. The total median price in that ZIP rose 57 percent from 2006 to 2007. In resales, fewer than half of Cobb's ZIPs saw a decrease, with 30106 showing the biggest drop, 6 percent, from 2006 to 2007.