Georgia

A great deal of Georgia’s housing stock is post-war: single-storey brick ranches with carports and crawl spaces went up across metropolitan Atlanta from the late 1940s to about 1970 and remain the dominant type in many DeKalb neighbourhoods, alongside pre-war bungalows in older Macon, Augusta and Savannah and subdivisions from every decade since.

Outside the metros the state is largely land: two thirds of Georgia is forest, more than nine tenths of that forest is privately owned, and families rather than companies hold the larger share, which is why so many parcels here are pine tracts that have carried the same surname for two or three generations.

Georgia is the one state with no elective share for a surviving spouse; instead a spouse or minor child may petition for Year’s Support, which sets aside property for twelve months’ maintenance and takes priority over most creditors, and an estate can pass by an order declaring no administration necessary, with no cap on its size, where there is no will, every heir signs and the debts are settled.

Land left without a will goes to the heirs as tenants in common in undivided shares, so none of them can sell or borrow against it alone, and Georgia adopted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act in 2012, effective the following year, to stop families losing land like that in a forced partition sale.

Foreclosure moves faster in Georgia than in most states because it is almost always non-judicial, with the lender advertising the sale for four weeks in the county’s legal organ and selling on the courthouse steps on the first Tuesday of the month, and no right of redemption once it is done.

Tax works differently on land than on houses, because a timber or farm tract may sit inside a ten-year conservation covenant that runs with the land rather than the owner, so breaking it costs twice the tax it saved plus interest and a buyer either continues the covenant or pays that penalty.

Houses are assessed at forty per cent of fair market value, and the homestead exemptions that hold a bill down belong to an owner living there, so when that owner dies or moves out the property is no longer homesteaded, and where a floating exemption had been capping the taxable value, the cap goes with them.

We buy houses and land in any condition and any era, and we take on the covenant, the title work and the heirs’ signatures rather than asking you to, so you choose the closing date, which once a first-Tuesday sale has been advertised is the only part of the timetable still yours to choose.