Do Better Schools Mean a Higher Price Per Foot in Alpharetta? What 1,199 Sales Say

Every relocation buyer I talk to starts with the GreatSchools map. Green pins good, yellow pins bad, and they will pay for green. It is the first thing that comes up on a call and it is usually what decides which zip codes make the list at all.

So I tested it. I pulled every closed detached single family sale in the city of Alpharetta over the past twelve months, 1,199 closings, sorted them by high school attendance zone, and set each zone next to its GreatSchools rating.

If the rating were driving price, ranking the zones by dollars per square foot should look something like ranking them by rating. It does not.

A 10 costs anywhere from $234 to $275 a foot

Four high school zones inside the city carry a 10 out of 10. Alpharetta High, which is where Windward sends its kids, plus Milton, Chattahoochee and Johns Creek.

Milton zone homes sold at a median of $275 per square foot. Alpharetta zone, $255. Johns Creek, $235. Chattahoochee, $234.

Same rating, 17 percent spread from the top of it to the bottom. Whatever separates a $275 zone from a $234 zone, it is not the rating, because the rating is identical.

The two zones rated a 9 make the point again. Cambridge came in at $278 a foot, higher than every 10 in the city. Denmark came in at $230, lower than every 10 in the city. Same rating as each other, opposite ends of the range.

The 7 sells for about the same as a 10

Centennial is the lowest rated high school zone inside Alpharetta at a 7. Homes there sold for $226 a foot. That is 4 percent under Chattahoochee, which is rated a 10.

Four percent is close enough to nothing that size mix alone could explain it, so I held the comparison to homes between 3,000 and 4,500 square feet, which takes the small house effect out. Centennial came in at $209. Chattahoochee, $216. Johns Creek, $217.

Three points of GreatSchools rating bought about three percent of price.

Why the rating is not doing the work here

The reason is simple once you see the whole board. Alpharetta does not have a bad school zone. Every high school serving the city is rated 7 or better. There is no cheap zone to run away from, so there is no discount to collect and no premium left to pay.

The school premium in this city got priced in years ago. It is baked into what the land costs. What separates $234 a foot from $275 a foot is the rest of the package: the age of the housing stock, the size of the lots, how long it takes to get to 400, how close you are to Avalon and downtown.

That is not an argument against caring about schools. It is an argument that inside Alpharetta the rating has already done its work on price, and you are choosing between good and good.

What this means if you are shopping Windward

Windward sits in the Alpharetta High zone, a 10, at $255 a foot. That is third of the seven zones, behind Cambridge at $278 and Milton at $275.

You are not paying a premium for the report card, because Milton has the same report card and costs $20 a foot more. What you are paying for in Windward is the lake, the golf, the swim and tennis, and the size of the houses. Those are real and they are worth what somebody will pay for them. They are just not the school rating.

If you are relocating and the GreatSchools map is driving your search, the useful move is to stop sorting Alpharetta by rating and start sorting it by commute, lot and year built. That is where the money actually is.

How I got there, and where it is soft

The data is every closed detached single family sale reported to FMLS in the city of Alpharetta over the past twelve months, 1,199 closings, grouped by the high school attendance zone the address falls in and matched to that school’s current GreatSchools rating.

Where it is soft. Zone level medians are blunt. Except where I held the comparison to the 3,000 to 4,500 square foot band, these are raw medians, and a zone full of smaller homes will look more expensive per foot for reasons that have nothing to do with the school. Attendance zones get redrawn, so a sale that closed early in the window may have been marketed under a different zone than the one it sits in today. GreatSchools ratings are a composite that moves year to year, which makes a 9 and a 10 closer together than the labels suggest. Condition, finish level, lot size and basement are not controlled for here at all.

This is also a finding about Alpharetta, not about schools generally. Widen the map to metro Atlanta, where ratings run the full range, and I would expect the school effect on price to show up clearly. Inside this city the range is not there to measure.

Windward by the Numbers

This is part of a running series where I take one question about the Windward market and answer it with the actual sales data instead of a rule of thumb. Earlier editions looked at what a pool is worth, what a finished basement is worth, what the lake premium really is, which month is the best month to list, what a newer build is worth, and whether Windward carries a premium over the rest of Alpharetta.

A new one goes out most Fridays. If you want them as they publish, the subscribe box on the blog page will do it, and you can reply to any of them with a question about your own street.

Thinking about buying or selling in Windward? I work North Atlanta full-time and I bring 30 years of New York real estate experience to every deal. Send me your address and I will run it against the same 1,199 sales.