Report: ATL home prices ballooned nearly 60 percent since pandemic

Josh Green

Tue, 01/28/2025 – 08:43

An eye-popping report released this week by Georgia Multiple Listing Service could be either disconcerting or a cause for celebration, depending on which side of the homeownership divide metro Atlantans fall.

The year-end 2024 figures compiled by Georgia MLS contrast the state of home prices across (traditionally affordable) metro Atlanta and Georgia today versus five years ago—or the last full year before a global pandemic sent the housing market into a tizzy, especially in Sun Belt places such as Atlanta and its suburbs.

Perhaps the most compelling number is the change in median close prices—a jump of 59 percent—for homes across what Georgia MLS considers Atlanta’s “core counties” between 2019 and 2024. (Those 12 counties are: Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Douglas, Fayette, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry, Paulding, and Rockdale.)

That means the median home sale five years ago around Atlanta was about $255,000. Today it’s $405,000, according to Georgia MLS’ tally for 2024.

That mark is still slightly less than the national sales median for 2024, when a dearth of supply led to a nearly 30-year low in total sales of previously occupied homes for the second year running—or what the Associated Press called the “latest evidence that homeownership is becoming increasingly less accessible to many Americans.”

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The phenomenon of dwindling supply has been felt locally, too.

More than 77,000 homes sold in metro Atlanta in 2019. But last year, that number had dipped by nearly 28 percent to just over 55,700, according to Georgia MLS tabulations.

If there’s any good news for buyers in the five-year roundup, it’s that homes stayed on the market longer in 2024 than at any point since the teens.

According to Georgia MLS, the median days-on-market for homes around Atlanta last year was 22 days. (Contrast that with the lunacy that was pandemic-era 2021, when the median DOM was a mere six days.)

Here’s a snapshot of Georgia MLS’ findings, both for Georgia at large and the dozen core counties around its capital city:

Georgia MLS