Services
A smaller house can mean a bigger tax bill
This catches long-time owners constantly. Under Georgia's HB 581, effective January 1 2025, a qualifying homestead's taxable value increases are capped at inflation from a base year. Own your home fifteen or twenty years and you may be paying tax on a value well below what it would sell for today.
That cap resets when you sell. The next house starts a new base year at its current fair market value. So a couple selling a long-held $850,000 house and buying a $525,000 one can find the tax bill drops far less than they assumed — the old bill was built on a suppressed base and the new one is not. And in Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb and DeKalb the school systems opted out of HB 581 entirely, so the largest line on the bill is uncapped. Before you commit to a target price, you get the estimated first-full-year bill on the new house.
Capital gains, and the trap for long-time owners
If you owned and used the home as your principal residence for at least two of the last five years, IRC Section 121 lets you exclude up to $250,000 of gain filing single, or $500,000 married filing jointly. For most sellers that covers everything. For a household that bought in metro Atlanta decades ago, it may not.
Gain above the exclusion is taxable, and it is calculated from your adjusted basis — purchase price plus documented capital improvements. Which is why the receipts from that 2009 kitchen and the 2016 roof matter more than anyone expects. Find your improvement records before you list, not at tax time. I am not a CPA and I will not pretend to be one, but I will tell you when your situation is one where that conversation is worth far more than it costs.
Buy first or sell first
There is no universally correct answer, only a correct answer for your finances.
• Sell first — strongest position as a buyer, no double payments, no bridge cost. The risk is housing yourself in between, and a negotiated rent-back from your buyer usually solves it for less than people assume.
• Buy first — you move once and shop without pressure. The cost is carrying both payments until the old house sells, priced at a realistic timeline rather than an optimistic one.
• Contingent offer — removes the overlap risk and weakens your offer. Sometimes enough to lose the house, sometimes not at all. I will tell you which situation you are in.
You get all three compared in writing, in dollars, with the cost of being wrong on each. Then you choose.