I was driving around in that area just last Tuesday night, having had both kids fall asleep on me in the car between eating out and heading to the Zany Brainy store at Reagan Parkway and Scenic Highway. Ended up driving out Lenora Church Road. I keep thinking that I’m going to make out to Lenora Park to play disc golf more regularly, but for various reasons, I never do.
If you’d consider looking a little closer in, our neighborhood (IMHO) offers a great combination of convenient location, Gwinnett tax rates, great neighborhood feel, etc. It’s a couple hundred yards inside Gwinnett County, just southeast of Spaghetti Junction. The area around it (bounded by I-85, Jimmy Carter, Lawrenceville Hwy, and Pleasantdale Rd./Chamblee-Tucker Rd.) is pretty heavily developed, but the neighborhood itself is quiet, pleasant, has a very active homeowners association (voluntary), a swim and racquet club with pool, tennis courts, playground, and a cabana next to a small lake, and it sounds like it’s about right for your price range (average price over last 18 months is $158K, with low of $139K very early in that time, and highs in the mid-180s recently for some of the newer, larger homes). Ours is at the small end of the size range at 2020 sf – most are 2300-2500sf. Lot sizes are between 1/4 and a bit over 1 acre – our corner lot is a little over 1/3.
The houses are between ten and twenty years old, with most of them toward the new end of that range. While most of the houses don’t have all of the frills that many buyers have come to expect in new houses these days (trey ceilings, enormous baths with garden tubs, etc.), most were built by very reputable and successful builders just before the explosion in development in Atlanta, meaning that they are, by and large, better built than anything from the last ten years as builders have scrambled to throw them up as fast as possible and have cut corners in the less visible areas. After at least ten years, any structural defects will have begun to appear, and I don’t know of any significant problems in that respect in the neighborhood, except for a couple that were the result of termite damage (a constant but avoidable threat in this part of the world).
The location has a lot to recommend it – you’ve got I-85, I-285, and Hwy 78 close by on three sides and can be on any of them in 5-10 minutes. It’s easy to get to Northlake, Stone Mountain, or Gwinnett Place, and both Perimeter Mall and Buckhead/Midtown/Downtown are pretty easy to reach as well. You also have alternatives to the most direct route in most directions – if 85’s backed up coming into town, you can take 78 into downtown or Buford Highway or Peachtree into Buckhead. It’s about as convenient as living just inside the perimeter in the Northlake, Embry Hills or Oak Grove areas, without the $75k-$150k premium houses there command over those just outside 285.
The knock on the area these days is the reputation of the schools in the Meadowcreek cluster, in large part because of the enormous number of apartments in the district and the transient nature of the students they feed into the schools. What the people in the Parkview, Brookwood, Collins Hill, and similar districts don’t seem to realize is that with the pro-development attitude of the county commission and their stated position that they aren’t obligated to consider the impact of development decisions on the schools, the same problems are headed their way quickly.
Sorry to go on at such length. I love the neighborhood and hate to see people think they have to go way out into Gwinnett, Rockdale, or Hall county to find a house of this size in a good, stable neighborhood in this price range. If you want to be farther out, that’s another matter.
Maybe I should add a fireman’s pole to our list too, since I know it’s only a matter of time before I slip on those steps (again) and break my neck.