Okay, things have picked up, but really? Atlanta real estate – number one?
Different real estate sources have different counts, differing definitions and cover somewhat different areas, so your mileage may vary, but this is the read from Redfin: Atlanta raced to the top in February.
Metro Atlanta recorded 6,389 homes sold last month, more than any other metro area, according to the Seattle-based data firm and and broker. In comparison, numbers two and three for the month were Chicago with 6,296 sales and Dallas-Ft. Worth with 5,721 homes sold.
The number of home sales in Atlanta was 8.1 higher than a year ago.
Total sales for the nation were 127,000, says Redfin.
Metro Atlanta’s median sales price during the month was $190,000, up 5.6 percent from the same month a year ago, but awfully reasonable sounding in the national scheme: 37 other metro areas have higher median home prices.
At the top of the charts is San Francisco with a median price of $1.1 million.
But Atlanta wasn’t even highest in Dixie. Among the Southern-ish cities with higher prices than Atlanta were Austin ($270,000), Miami $242,000), Charleston ($237,950), Nashville ($229,000), Raleigh-Durham ($223,900) and Richmond ($194,900).
One reason why prices are going up is that pesky supply–demand thing.
That has been the story in metro Atlanta real estate for several years now. In a time of modestly improving demand, there just hasn’t been enough supply.
The result has been a very sluggish market in some areas and some fairly strong price increases in others.
Don’t expect a quick turnaround in that story, Redfin says: there were 19,335 homes are for sale in Atlanta, down 13.6 percent from the same month a year ago, and 5.3 fewer homes for sale than the month before.
