A $100,000 Household Can Afford Just 38% of Metro Atlanta Listings
Metro Atlanta offers more homes than buyers, but affordability remains limited. Households earning $100,000 can afford only about 38% of the listings, underscoring a shortage of affordable homes for middle-income buyers.
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Metro Atlanta has become a buyer’s market in one important sense: people who are able to buy now have more homes to consider and fewer competitors standing in their way.
That advantage disappears quickly, however, when the search reaches the household budget.
A household earning $100,000 can afford only 37.9% of the homes listed across the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta metropolitan area, according to a new National Association of Realtors analysis. In a market properly aligned with local incomes, approximately 52.1% of listings would fall within that household’s reach.
Under the report’s assumptions, a $100,000 income supports a maximum home price of approximately $355,340. The NAR analysis estimates that metro Atlanta is missing about 5,500 listings at the price points needed to close the gap.
The finding adds an important qualification to Atlanta’s new status as a buyer-friendly market. There may be many more sellers than buyers, but a large portion of the available inventory remains too expensive for middle-income households.
“Those are two different things,” Nadia Evangelou, principal economist and director of real estate research at the National Association of Realtors, told North Atlanta Star in a written response.
“For buyers, more inventory means more choices, more time to make a decision and more room to negotiate,” she said.
The affordability problem, she added, has not gone away.
More listings, but not at the needed prices
North Atlanta Star reported earlier this week that Redfin estimated metro Atlanta had 39,842 sellers and 21,154 buyers in July. That difference—approximately 88% more sellers than buyers—placed Atlanta firmly on the buyer’s side of the market.
Those figures describe competition. They do not describe purchasing power.
A buyer who qualifies for a particular house may now be able to negotiate the price, request repairs, preserve an inspection contingency or ask the seller to contribute toward closing costs. None of those advantages helps a household whose affordable price ceiling is hundreds of thousands of dollars below the asking price.
Evangelou said increased inventory has been an important part of the Southern housing shift. Texas had approximately 29% more homes for sale than it did in July 2019, while Florida’s inventory was about 11% above its pre-pandemic level.
She cautioned against interpreting that growth as evidence that Southern demand has vanished. The region continues to gain residents, but pandemic-era price increases and elevated borrowing costs have pushed many potential buyers out of the active market.
The result is an unusual combination: plenty of homes waiting for purchasers, yet too few homes priced for the households most likely to buy them.
Atlanta’s middle-income shortage
The National Association of Realtors created a Listing-Income Alignment Score to measure how closely the prices of available homes correspond with the incomes of households in each metropolitan area.
Metro Atlanta’s score reached 80.6% in March, a considerable improvement from 73.2% one year earlier. It remains below the 91.4% recorded in March 2019, before the pandemic transformed home prices and mortgage payments.
The score does not mean that 80.6% of Atlanta homes are affordable. It measures how much access households have to the types of listings that would normally be available in a balanced market.
The underlying figures show that the greatest shortage remains concentrated in the lower and middle portions of the market.
A household earning $75,000 could afford a home priced at approximately $266,500 under the report’s model. Only 17.1% of metro Atlanta listings fell within that range, compared with the 39.5% expected in a balanced market. NAR calculated a shortage of nearly 8,800 affordable listings for households at that income level.
At $125,000 in household income, the estimated purchasing limit rises to approximately $444,180. About 56.1% of Atlanta listings were affordable at that level, still below the balanced-market share of 62.6%.
The mismatch becomes much smaller at higher incomes. A household earning $150,000 could reach homes priced up to approximately $533,000, while the gap essentially disappeared for households earning $200,000.
That division is especially visible in North Atlanta. During the three months ending in July, median sale prices stood at approximately $728,000 in Johns Creek, $675,000 in Roswell and $615,000 in Suwanee.
The NAR report covers the entire metropolitan area, and those city figures measure completed sales rather than current listings. Even so, the distance between a $355,000 purchasing limit and prevailing North Atlanta sale prices helps explain why the new buyer’s market may feel largely theoretical to a household earning $100,000.
What buyers can negotiate—and what they cannot
More inventory can still produce meaningful opportunities. A seller may accept a lower offer, contribute toward closing expenses or pay for a temporary mortgage-rate reduction. Buyers may also have enough time to compare insurance costs, examine an inspection report and walk away from a house that requires expensive repairs.
Those concessions are most useful to households already close to affording the property. They cannot transform a $600,000 house into one that fits a $355,000 budget.
For sellers, the shift means that pricing a home around the expectations of 2021 or 2022 is increasingly difficult. Buyers have alternatives, and properties that begin with unrealistic prices can remain on the market even when comparable homes continue to sell.
Atlanta’s improving alignment score suggests that the market is moving in a healthier direction. Buyers have regained some of the time and negotiating power they lost during the pandemic frenzy, while sellers can no longer assume that several competing offers will arrive immediately.
But balance between buyers and sellers is only one part of a functioning housing market. The larger challenge is creating enough homes at prices that correspond with what local households actually earn.
Until that happens, metro Atlanta can simultaneously be a buyer’s market and a difficult place to buy a home.
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