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Friends,

The 2021 holiday season has officially begun! We hope you are as excited as we are.

We’d like to take a moment to express our gratitude to all of you this Thanksgiving. We have met some truly wonderful people, and we’re proud to have helped so many reach their real estate goals over the years.

We wouldn’t be where we are today without all of your support.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner—that’s what we plan to do!

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any real estate questions. We would be happy to help you.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Cynthia Pierce

Halloween and real estate make fall really exciting in the Atlanta area.

Fall is one of my favorite times of the year. There's so much to do around Atlanta, and real estate is always busy. Atlanta is one of the top five relocation cities for major corporations, so sellers may see a lot more corporate relocators looking at their homes. You may not have 20 or 30 people making offers, but those who are coming are very serious. You should decorate your home at this time of year if you're selling. It makes your home more welcoming and friendly.

Here are some of the fun things to do around Halloween in Atlanta: The historic Oakland cemetery does tours with music and costumes. The Fox Theater ho...

Here's my advice for homebuyers who are on the fence about purchasing.

Are you or is someone you know frustrated by the current real estate market? I’m seeing three distinct scenarios out there:

1. Some sellers love the market and are selling very quickly.

2. Some sellers are sitting on the fence and waiting on the sidelines to see what happens.

3. Some buyers are waiting for cooler and calmer market conditions.

Interest rates are still unbelievably low. The average right now for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage is 2.86%. The three major housing industry entities, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Mortgage Bankers Association, all predict that prices will continue to rise in 2022 by as mu...

Here are some key tips for homebuyers from my feature in USA Today.

Recently, I was featured on USA Today for helping a young couple buy their first home in today’s crazy market. It’s a wonderful story, and I think there’s a lot to learn from their journey. I want to share some key home-buying advice I used to help the Picchiottino family buy their first home:

Be prepared to pay over asking price. In today’s market, sellers often underprice their homes in order to drive competition among buyers. If this works, home listings can resemble an auction more than a traditional sale. Because of this, it’s a good idea to ask your Realtor what they think a home will act...

You’ve probably seen ads or heard about companies like Offerpad, Knock and Opendoor who advertise a more convenient way to sell your home through instant offers and streamlined selling. They have become known as “iBuyers” and are for-profit investors who use automated valuation models based on tax records and neighborhood sales data to make expedited offers on homes and resell them.

Recently, a Keller Williams colleague in Atlanta put Offerpad, Knock and Opendoor to the test by comparing their offers for the same properties with traditional methods of home valuation. He received markedly different results! You can quickly eyeball the findings below but I encourage you to rea...

Happy New Year! I hope you had a lovely holiday doing the things you enjoy most. I was unearthing bins of woolens myself (it's freezing in Atlanta!), but hopefully you did something more fun!

In most countries throughout the world, the beginning of a new year ushers in vows of self-improvement and hopes for health, happiness, and prosperity. Some cultures, however, practice traditions that are quite different and, in my opinion, worth a try!

Denmark. Most people would be angry and perplexed to wake up to a pile of broken dishes at their front doors—but if it’s New Year’s Eve in Denmark, the debris is welcomed as a sign of popularity. Danes stockpile unused plates, and on Dece...

If you are curious about the details, I’ve linked the request for proposal known as Amazon HQ2 RFP here, but the essential requirements are:

• Within 30 miles of a metro area with 1M+ resident...

Statistics abound in the real estate profession. It just comes with the territory, both at the national and local levels. However, active buyers and sellers shouldn’t put too much stock in generalized, high-level data about sales in an area because a home price and time on market can vastly differ from the average depending on several factors: time of year, the condition of the property and the exact location (even block). A home for sale next to the beltline, for example, isn’t going to fall in line with expectations for a listing 2 blocks away even though they both are in the same neighborhood.

But statistics are a good starting point for realtors to establish a baseline of res...