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.

Ask around Windward long enough and you will hear some version of the same claim. Windward carries a premium. The lake, the golf club, the swim and tennis, the gates on some of the streets, the fact that people outside the neighborhood know the name. It sounds right, and the sale prices seem to back it up.

Nobody ever puts a number on it. So I pulled every closed detached single family sale in the city of Alpharetta over the past twelve months, 1,200 of them, separated out the 87 that sold inside Windward, and checked whether Windward actually trades above the rest of the city.

The answer depends entirely on how you measure it, and the two obvious ways of measuring it point in opposite directions.

The short answer: $94,000 on the sticker, nothing per square foot

The median Windward sale over the past year was $920,000. The median for Alpharetta as a whole was $826,000. That is a gap of $94,000, or about 11 percent. On the headline number the premium is real, and it is not small.

Now price the same homes by the square foot. Windward came in at $238. The city came in at $247. Measured that way Windward is not above Alpharetta at all. It is about 4 percent below it.

Both numbers are true. They disagree because they are measuring different things.

Windward homes are simply bigger

The median Windward sale was 3,896 square feet. The citywide median was 3,437. That is a difference of about 460 square feet, roughly 13 percent more house. Multiply the extra footage by the going rate and you have most of the $94,000 accounted for before you have said anything about the lake.

Closed detached single family sales, city of Alpharetta, August 2025 through August 2026. Source: FMLS.

The per foot comparison has a problem of its own, and it is worth saying out loud. Smaller homes almost always carry a higher price per square foot, because a kitchen and a roof and a furnace cost what they cost whether the house is 2,400 feet or 4,400. Alpharetta as a whole has more small homes in it than Windward does, so the citywide $247 is flattered by them. The raw per foot number is not the final answer either.

Match the homes and the gap closes

The honest test is to compare homes of the same size. Among the 381 sales between 3,000 and 4,500 square feet, Windward ran $238 a foot against $235 for the rest of Alpharetta. Windward ahead by about 1 percent.

Then I ran all 1,200 sales through a model that holds square footage, bedrooms, full baths, half baths, year built and month of sale constant, and asks what is left over for being in Windward. The answer was 1.9 percent, with a standard error of 2.7 points. In plain language, the leftover Windward effect is smaller than the noise in the data. Statistically it is a tie.

Two different methods, both landing within a couple of points of zero. That is about as clean an answer as this kind of question gives you.

What this means if you are selling

Your price is coming from your square footage, your condition and your finish level. It is not coming from the sign at the entrance. That is less deflating than it sounds, because square footage is the thing Windward actually has.

The practical trap is pricing off Windward comps by price alone. If the last four sales on your side of the neighborhood were 4,200 foot houses at $960,000 and yours is 3,200 feet, those are not your comps, and no amount of Windward address is going to close that gap. Price per foot inside your own size band is the number to argue from.

The other thing worth knowing is that the market is not paying you a separate line item for the amenities. It is paying you for the house. Lead with the house.

What this means if you are buying

You are not paying a surcharge for the address. Per square foot, adjusted for everything I can adjust for, Windward is priced like the rest of Alpharetta. The lake, the golf, the swim and tennis and the sidewalks come with the neighborhood rather than on top of the price.

What you are paying for is a bigger house, and a bigger house is a real cost that keeps showing up after closing in taxes, insurance and utilities. Budget the amenity dues on top of that, because the sale price is not discounting for them.

The flip side is that buying in Windward does not require you to believe a premium will hold up. You are buying at the city rate.

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 from August 27, 2025 through August 26, 2026. That is 1,200 closings. Windward is defined as any sale whose subdivision field contains Windward, which came to 87 sales. The model uses the 1,185 of those closings that had complete size, bedroom, bathroom and year built data, and it explains about 74 percent of the variation in price.

Where it is soft. Eighty-seven sales is a working sample, not a large one, and a true premium of a few percent would be hard to separate from noise at that size. The subdivision field is typed in by the listing agent, so a Windward home entered only under a sub-neighborhood name would not have been counted. Condition and finish level are not in the model at all, and Windward runs the full range from original 1990s kitchens to full renovations. Lot size, lake frontage and golf frontage are not separated out here either. I looked at the lake premium on its own in an earlier edition, and that one is real.

If your house is unusual in any of those ways, the neighborhood average is the wrong starting point and you should be working from your own comps.

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, and what a newer build is worth.

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 1,200 sales.

Sale price by era built, relative to an identical home built 1995 to 1999. Controlled for square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms and date of sale. 576 closed sales in ZIP 30005, August 2024 through August 2026. Source: FMLS.

Every buyer I take through Windward eventually asks the same question. Two houses, same street, same size, same finishes. One went up in 1990 and one in 2000. How much is that decade worth?

It is a fair question and nobody ever answers it with a number. So I pulled every closed detached single family sale in ZIP 30005 over the past two years, 576 of them, and ran the regression.

The straight answer: about $50,000 a decade

Holding square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, neighborhood and sale date constant, every year of age takes roughly 0.6% off the price. On an $800,000 Windward-area home that is about $5,000 a year, so the 1990 house and the 2000 house end up around $50,000 apart.

That is the answer most people expect. It is also the least useful number in the data, because the average hides the shape.

Age does not bleed value evenly

When I let each era of construction have its own number instead of forcing a straight line, something more interesting shows up. Once you control for size, everything built between 1985 and 2014 trades within a few points of everything else. A 1987 build and a 2007 build are worth about the same money, and none of those gaps are wide enough to call real.

Then the last ten years break away. Homes built in 2015 or later sold for about 29% more than an otherwise identical 1990s home. On a typical sale in our area that is close to $200,000.

That premium is not a fluke of one new subdivision. It held at 25% when I added controls for the specific neighborhood, and at 27% when I dropped Halcyon and the Caney Creek builds out of the data entirely.

What this means if you are selling

Your 1996 house is not being punished for its birthday. It is being priced on condition.

The market has already decided that a well kept 1996 home and a well kept 1987 home are worth about the same thing. That means the roof, the HVAC, the kitchen and the floors are doing the work the build year is not. Which is good news, because that is the part you control. Moving from the bottom of your era to the top of it is worth more than a decade of construction date.

What this means if you are buying

New construction in and around Windward is asking roughly a $200,000 premium over the 1990s inventory. That is the number to hold up against a renovation budget, not against a feeling.

Sometimes new wins. Often it does not, especially when the older house sits on a lot, a street, and a school assignment the new one cannot match. Run the two numbers side by side before you decide.

How I got there, and where it is soft

576 closed detached single family sales in ZIP 30005 between August 21, 2024 and August 21, 2026, pulled from FMLS. I regressed the log of sale price on square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, year built, subdivision and date of sale, so the age figure describes two homes that are alike in every other way I can measure. The model explains about 81% of the variation in price.

The weak spot is the new end. Only 19 of the 576 sales were homes built in 2015 or later, so I am comfortable calling the new construction premium 25% to 29% and not comfortable calling it one number. The per year estimate is sturdier and held between 0.55% and 0.99% across every version of the model I ran, including trimming outliers, dropping the sales above $2 million, and running it on 2025 closings only.

Square footage comes from the MLS price per square foot field. Eight sales were missing it, and one 1960 build was the only home in the set older than 1980, so 567 closings carried the model.

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, and which month is the best month to list.

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 576 sales.