The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Deep dive on home sale: Where it's hot - or not - in metro Atlanta
In this extraordinary year, despite the nonstop demands of a pandemic, protests and a delayed election, Atlanta’s real estate market has barely paused.
Real estate experts say the supply of housing here in the metro area continues to lag behind the demand of buyers wanting to get into a new home. But is this the right time to put your home on the market? And is that house you’re hoping to make an offer on really a good deal in its neighborhood?
Today, The Atlanta Journal-Constitu
tion is offering our readers a new tool to help make those decisions. The AJC 2020 Metro Atlanta Home Sales Report compiles information on home sales by county and ZIP code, including year
over-year price and sales comparisons. We believe making sense of this kind of data provides an essential service to our readers to help them understand trends, values and other important information about almost everyone’s most valuable asset: their home.
Today we’re releasing stories analyzing sales in six counties: Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, Forsyth and Clayton. An additional 20 counties in the extended metro area will be added soon. Our data, provided by Smart Real Estate Data of Marietta, is current to the end of April, giving you a glimpse of early market changes caused by coronavirus.
In a place the size and complexity of metro Atlanta, so many real estate transactions are filed each month that it is hard for humans to keep up. So we have decided to use special software that collects and analyzes home sales data at a speed and volume that are beyond what AJC can do with editors and reporters alone. AJC Bot reviews county sales records and automatically generates draft articles tailored to ZIP codes all over metro Atlanta.
To be clear, this isn’t replacing humans — it’s adding to what our journalists can do. Artificial intelligence is great at breaking down massive amounts of data, but we still need humans to make sense of the math.
The AJC’s partner in this initiative is United Robots, a Swedish company that provides automated editorial texts generated from large sets of data, such as real estate records, sports results, the land registry and new business registrations. Publishers in the U.S. and several European nations use automated reporting to free reporters to focus on reporting rather than analyzing data.