Alpharetta Real Estate Homes for Sale

For people interested in learning more about the proposed Freemanville High School in Milton from the citizens’ perspective, there will be a presentation by local residents tonight at the City Council working session.  The presentation is scheduled for 6 PM and will highlight some of the environmental impacts of building a new high school on the proposed site.

I don’t want to ruin the ending for you, but one of the significant findings is that the a new high school would product 100,000 gallons a day of septic waste.  It would be the highest single source septic system in the City of Milton by far and would further increase the bacterial load in Chicken Creek, which is already elevated.  

Negative environmental impact is the horse that community opponents are betting on to stop the development of the high school at that location.  For more information you can goto:  ProtectMilton.com or check back with the City of Milton website for the minutes after the meeting.

With Spring Break over, all attention is back to the classroom and CRCT testing which began this week.  I’m sure our students will keep our scores in North Fulton the highest in the county and among the top in the state.

As students sharpen their No. 2 pencils, new classrooms are under construction to house the continued influx of children into North Fulton school districts.  The growth that we experienced in 2004-5, when 2,236 new students enrolled in North Fulton schools, has subsided somewhat.  However, we still have over 1,000 new student each year.

By the 2011-12 school year, projections show that there will be almost 50,000 students in North Fulton public schools, up from about 45,000 today.  Growth pains, as they say, are a good problem to have, but we have to find a way to have classroom space for these students.  Currently we have some elementary schools that were designed for 850 student packed with over 1,000 students.

As one insider at Alpharetta HS told me:  "Johns Creek High is going to be an academic powerhouse.  It is going to get the best of Northview and Chattahoochee High Schools."

Johns Creek High School Principal Appointed

Johns Creek is also getting Buck Greene as its first principal.  Greene is transferring from Alpharetta High Schools, where he has served as principal since opening in 2004 and which won the Governor’s Cup this year for most improvement in SAT scores.  Alpharetta HS was ninth in the state last year for SAT scores with an average score of 1647.

Birmingham Elementary School Planned to Open August 2009

In contrast to the visible progress on Johns Creek HS, is Birmingham Elementary School.  You can’t tell by looking at the land - because no disturbance has been done at all - that in a little over a year there will be a new elementary school at Wood Road and Birmingham Highway, in Milton.  The School Board is completely committed to this school, the plans are selected and the Board says construction should start soon.  It takes about nine months to build an elementary school, they say.  Looks like they are going to take it down to the wire.

Planning sessions with the community will begin this fall to discuss the new attendance zone.  I’ve received a number of inquires from people about my opinion of who will go where.  My OPINION - and it is only that - is that all neighborhoods north of Providence Road and west of Freemanville Road will attend the new school.  Some scattered other neighborhoods like Fieldstone Farms, Wood Valley, The Oaks at White Columns and Highland Manor will also likely be zoned to Birmingham ES, but again, this is only a guess.

Just as Johns Creek HS stands to be very good academically because it is drawing from a good base, Birmingham ES will be a quality school academically no doubt because it is drawing from the same population as Summit Hill, Crabapple Crossing and Cogburn Woods, all excellent schools.

Freemanville Road High School

The Board of Education maintains that it is still committed to building a new high school on Freemanville Road, dispite the community opposition.  The only thing that has changed recently is that they have pushed back the scheduled opening date a year to the 2012-13 school year.

The Board of Education also has mentioned building a Middle School adjacent to the Freemanville HS that wouldn’t open until 2014.  Some private individuals who are opposed to any school development on Freemanville have paid to have an environmental impact study done which has revealed that, due to septic system demands, at best only one school could (or should?) be built on the proposed site just south of White Columns.

It remains to be seen how this will play out.  I still maintain the the best solution is to redevelop the "old Milton High School" site with a multi-story design that work on the smaller land parcel while still providing all the amenities of a modern school.  Obviously, many well designed high schools are built around the country in urban settings on far fewer acres.  We shouldn’t rule out redeveloping the old site just because we have a templated model of how we build high schools in Fulton County. 

This case calls for breaking the model because the alternative is to build a (sprawling?) high school on a piece of land that (1) is not well suited for it and (2) will definitely impact the character of the area.  Will it "ruin" the area?  No.  Is there a better option in my humble opinion? Definitely.

The world of Real Estate Search is changing.  Two years ago, I was one of the very first Realtors in Georgia to offer my website users a map-based search engine. 

People flocked to it.  It was cutting edge at the time - and still remains the best way to search for homes online - but it is time to introduce more and better search features.

Therefore, today, I’ve started offering my website users the option of using a new search tool from an Atlanta-based company named Soft Realty. 

Click on the picture above to try a sample search or CLICK HERE to go directly to a search for Alpharetta Real Estate between $300k and $800k.

I need your feedback regarding how you like it - particularly compared to what I already have, which is pretty good,  I think.

The new solution has some advantages for me, namely that it is free, as its revenue model is ad-based.  (The solution is still in beta and no ads are showing yet, but would you mind if they were?  It would be like Zillow or Realtor dot com, that both have ads.)

For you the advantages are more features.  The current beta solution doesn’t have all the features yet, but from what I’ve seen so far, the promise of better usability and fuller features for you, the real estate searching public, is just around the corner.

As a real estate agent, I must use a third-party vendor to provide the home search feature for web clients.  There are only a handful of such providers to choose from and most of them offer solutions that are woefully inadequate.  These vendors are catering to the lowest common denominator, and I don’t want to be the LCD. 

I don’t want you, my client, to have to settle for average when we have so many ideas to make home searching better and easier.  Getting someone to implement them is the hard part; if we were allowed to do it ourselves, believe me we would.

For instance, my existing solution does not allow you to view all homes in a specified school’s attendance zone, if you can believe that.  With Soft Realty, I can do this as basic functionality. 

Basic Searchs for Alpharetta Homes by School Attendance Zone

For example, CLICK HERE to see all homes for sale in the Crabapple Crossing Elementary attendance zone (there are 94 as of today); or CLICK HERE to see all homes for sale in the Alpharetta High School attendance zone (there are 245 as of today).

My hope is that the Soft Realty solution will allow us to implement more of the features we know that you want and differentiate our search solution from the lowest common denominator agents.

For now, there is no registration required to use the solution.  I won’t know who or if you are trying it, so I’ll rely on you to contact me if (1) you like the solution and/or have some feedback; and (2), if you want to see any of the houses in person.

After all, that is the primary purpose of online search:  To find houses to actually go view.  So, when you are ready, please reach out to me - you might consider leaving a comment to this post - and let’s not be the lowest common denominator together.

Happy searching.

If you thought the "sub-prime meltdown" was bad for property values and the real estate market, try losing your school accreditation.  Whoops, there goes 30% of your home’s value faster than a high school student can skip class.

Unfortunately for the homeowners in Clayton County, which is SOUTH of Atlanta, their homes are now more liabilities than assets.  But more to the point, the students, who are mostly innocent bystanders in the dysfunctional political world concocted by adults, are the big losers.  Have you ever tried to get into college from an unaccredited high school?  No accreditation also means no HOPE scholarship, Georgia’s big educational plum funded by lottery money.  And for the little kids?  Well, they lose, too:  no pre-K funding.

If Clayton County does not meet a set of nine requirements by September 1 set forth by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, it will have the infamous distinction of accomplishing what no school district in the country has accomplished since 1969:  revocation of its accreditation - primarily due to mismanagement and ineptitude.  You see, those elections to the School Board that you never vote in…THEY MATTER.

The reasons for the loss of accreditation are a litany of typical bureaucratic abuses:  unethical behavior by Board Members; misuse of funds; abuse of power; bid tampering and conflict of interest.  This is the second time in five years that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools has investigated Clayton and I wouldn’t be surprised if this time they pulled the plug.

As much as my sympathies go out to the Clayton school children, I’m also aggravated by the Clayton School Board because of the negative shadow it casts on the rest of public education in Atlanta.  It is bad enough that people from the north and west already think that we are a bunch of illiterate rednecks right out of the north Georgia mountains.  Now we have Clayton’s incompetence compounding our public image.

What gets lost in the shuffle is that Atlanta does have some very good schools, namely the public schools in East Cobb, North Fulton and South Forsyth.  Clayton County’s problems are symptomatic of larger problems of poverty, depreciating property values and deteriorating social fabric…and it is in the SUBURBS, not the inner city.

Clayton’s struggles beg the question recently asked by Matt Miller in his article, First, Kill All the Schools Boards in The Atlantic:  Should school control really be in the hands of local (mis)managers?

The argument for local control (and local control is mostly an historical artifact) has always been that it keeps the parents and community vested in the success of the schools. 

The flip side is that our current system has unbelievable funding inequities because school financing is tied to property tax values and we have no clear measure of how schools perform relative to each other, within Georgia or when comparing to other states.

Additionally, Clayton County’s troubles could have come at no better time to make Miller’s points that local school boards are incompetent and cannot govern effectively because as independent political entities, with off-year elections in which no one votes, they have effectively become controlled by competent teachers’ unions and other vendors with large financial stakes.

I write all this just to say that there ARE some good schools in Atlanta; we aren’t (all ;->) a bunch of hicks, nor are we incompetent boobs.  I’ve written about the quality of North Fulton Schools here many times before and will continue to harp on the topic because I believe that when people are looking for a new home in Atlanta, one of the first things they consider is the quality of the schools.

Without the benefit of national standards - yet - the closest thing we have to compare Alpharetta area schools to those in other states is the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS).  Last year, all the Middle Schools in North Fulton (Northwestern, Hopewell, Autry Mill, River Trail) scored above the 70th percentile in reading and the Fulton Science Academy, which is a charter school focusing on math and science, scored in the 80th percentile.

At the 3rd Grade level, North Fulton has FIFTEEN schools score in the 80th percentile or better for reading, including the likes of Dolvin, Cogburn Woods, Barnwell, Crabapple Crossing, Summit Hill and New Prospect.  Shakerag was the leader at the 85th percentile.  You can get the complete scores here.

The situation in Clayton County makes me sick, because a lot of those school children are fighting an uphill battle to begin with and now they have to deal with this.  What about kids who are juniors in high school and whose family cannot move - what are they supposed to do?  But as sick as this makes me fell, it would make me even sicker if you thought that every public school system in Atlanta was like this.  They aren’t and we aren’t.

Damage control done.

A few weeks ago, the AJC Homefinder published an article implying that the SAT scores of an area high school drove the average sales price.

The argument went that Higher SAT Scores => Higher Average Sales Price.  The first rule of statistics, other than there is a statistic to prove every point, is that correlation does not prove causation.  It is possible for two statistics to be positively, or even negatively, correlated and still have nothing to do with each other. 

For instance, many people gain weight as they get older.  Does aging cause obesity?  Hardly not.  Not being active and eating the wrong food causes obesity.

When I read the Homefinder article I immediately thought to myself that the opposite hypothesis was true:  Higher Average Sales Price => Higher SAT Scores.  It is the classic chicken and egg problem:  what came first?  Was an area wealthy first and that helped the schools perform well or did the students pull an average area up by its bookpack straps and cause other parents to want to move there, which drove up the home values?

Of course, there really is no "right" answer.  The Homefinder was simply trying to put a real estate edge on a topic, because that is what they do:  write about real estate to sell newspapers/advertising.  But if we really analyze it, good schools are more often than not the result of good community and family situations.  That is, families with one stay at home parent, two parent families, stability, discipline, educated parents, involved parents, low crime and violence…you know, family values and community involvement.

To say that schools drive home prices…all we can say is that there is a correlation.  What is more accurate, and the title of the Homefinder article, is that schools do "make" the sale.  If given a choice to purchase a home in an average or outstanding school district, a family will always pick the outstanding if they can afford it (and find a house they like - or may settle on one they don’t like as much). 

The Homefinder article points out that over a hundred homes were sold in one intown school district and only seven in an adjacent district.  Clearly schools matter.  Schools are the number one thing that prospective buyers in the area ask me about when considering different areas.  [Check HERE for more school comparision data.]

And sellers in good school districts, Milton in particular, always want to put a premium on their home because of the "quality of the schools."  The numbers below show that the average price in Milton High School district has increased faster than in the other districts.

So, let’s look at some meaningless statistics ;->  The Homefinder article gave average sales price and SAT score for two Gwinnett and Cobb County high schools.  Unfortunately they didn’t publish the numbers for North Fulton, so I went and crunched the numbers for all six North Fulton High Schools, just for curiosity’s sake.  [Note:  If you are interested in average sales price in other high school districts, like Forsyth or Cherokee for instance, just call me and I’ll gladly crunch those numbers for you.]  Here is what I found for North Fulton High Schools:

Average Home Price and SAT Score by Neighborhood in North Fulton

Here is my biggest finding:  if you look at the price per point of SAT result, the best place to buy a house is in the Northview High School District.  There, one SAT point costs you $236.53.  How is that for a meaningless statistic?  Centennial and Milton have the highest price for a point of SAT at $245 per point.  Again, meaningless, but fun to calculate. 

It is interesting to see the averages by school district, a number that is not readily available elsewhere, and it shows that the most expensive district to live in (Milton) doesn’t have the highest SAT scores.  There are tons of other factors at play here.  Bottom line is that all the schools are good and that the housing opportunities are just different in each.