In Johns Creek, $700,000 Buys Two Completely Different Houses

A buyer relocating from out of state pulls up three home value trackers before their first Johns Creek showing. Zillow says the typical home is worth $651,407, barely moved in a year. Redfin says the median sale price in February was $700,000, up slightly from last year. Movoto says the median list price in August is $759,000, down roughly 7 percent from where it stood twelve months earlier. Three sites. Three numbers. Three different directions.

None of them are wrong. They are measuring different things in different months using different math. But that disagreement is the most useful fact a buyer can walk into this market with, because it points at something the sticker price hides: in Johns Creek right now, there is no single $700,000 house. There are at least two, and they have almost nothing in common except the number on the sign.

The number depends on who's counting, and when

Zillow's figure is a smoothed index built from estimated values across the entire housing stock, and as of late June 2026 it showed homes going to pending in about nine days. Redfin's number comes from actual closed sales, and in February 2026 it put the median at $700,000 with homes averaging 36 days on market across 47 recorded sales. Movoto's August 2026 snapshot tracks list prices rather than sold prices, and it showed the median sitting at $759,000, a per-square-foot price of $237, and a median 38 days on market.

Read closely, the per-square-foot figure is the one worth sitting with. A 5 percent year-over-year drop in price per square foot, alongside days on market that barely moved, is not the profile of a market cooling off because buyers vanished. It is the profile of a market where the mix of what's selling has shifted. When the type of home changing hands changes, the median changes with it, even if nothing about buyer demand or seller urgency has moved at all.

That shift is the story. And it traces back to something simple: Johns Creek mostly finished building itself two decades ago.

Why "new" and "expensive" have split apart

Roughly three-quarters of the housing stock in Johns Creek was built between 1980 and 2000. That is not a marginal statistic, it is the reason the city's new-construction map looks like a handful of pins instead of a spreading pattern. There is very little raw land left to develop, so new supply does not arrive as new subdivisions carved out of farmland. It arrives as infill: a gated enclave of twenty homesites here, a townhome community built into a former business park there.

That geography matters because it decides what "new" actually looks like at any given price. In a market with open land, new construction usually means a bigger single-family home for a bigger check. In Johns Creek, new construction increasingly means an attached townhome, because townhomes fit on the parcels that are actually available.

Walk through what's on the ground right now and the split becomes obvious.

At Ellsworth, a gated community of just 24 homesites, the final available homes late last year were listed at $629,900 for a four-bedroom Hewitt plan and $699,900 for a five-bedroom Sagecrest plan with a basement, according to builder SR Homes' announcement through Atlanta Real Estate Forum. Both sit at or below the city's median list price, and both are new construction with quarter-acre-plus homesites.

At Ward's Crossing, a townhome community from The Providence Group, current listings run roughly $699,320 to $739,550 for around 2,400 square feet, four bedrooms and 3.5 baths. The HOA there covers professional management, landscaping and structural insurance, the kind of arrangement that trades yard work for a monthly bill.

Inside the 43-acre Medley development at Johns Creek Parkway and McGinnis Ferry Road, the mixed-use project from Toro Development is bringing 133 townhomes alongside 750 residences, a boutique hotel and roughly 150,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, according to the Johns Creek Convention and Visitors Bureau. Builder Empire Homes has been marketing its Tableau at Medley townhomes from around $700,000, with completion expected in the fall of 2026.

None of that is cheap. All of it is new. And all of it lands within a few thousand dollars of the city's median, whichever version of the median you're reading.

Then the market jumps. At Bellmoore Park, new single-family construction has been listed between $1.3 million and $1.61 million. At Bellwyn, a gated enclave of just 20 homesites near the future Johns Creek Town Center, the builder markets GE Café-series kitchens and third-story retreats at a price point well clear of the townhome tier. Push further still, into Country Club of the South or St. Ives Country Club, and gated estate homes clear $3 million.

There is no meaningful new-construction inventory sitting quietly at $900,000 to $1.2 million. The market skips it. You are either buying new at the townhome price band, or you are buying new a full price tier up in detached single-family. The gap in between is where the resale stock, the homes built in that 1980 to 2000 wave, does almost all of the work.

What this means for a buyer comparing two houses

Picture the buyer from the opening of this piece touring two homes, both listed near $700,000. One is a resale single-family home from the 1990s, likely on a larger lot, with an older roof, original mechanicals somewhere in their service life, and a floor plan that hasn't been touched since the last owner. The other is a brand-new townhome at Ward's Crossing or Tableau at Medley, smaller footprint, shared walls, an HOA check that covers exterior maintenance, and a warranty on everything from the roof to the water heater.

Same price. Same city. Almost nothing else in common. The decision isn't really about square footage or finish level, it's about which set of tradeoffs a household is willing to live with: land and age, or newness and density. Portals that report a single median obscure that choice entirely.

Where the corridors come in

Johns Creek is generally understood by buyers through three commute and location corridors rather than by neighborhood name alone. The St. Ives and Medlock Bridge area sits along Peachtree Parkway. The State Bridge corridor runs through the center of the city. The Rivermont and Holcomb Bridge area connects to GA-400 by the back roads. These are geographic and commute distinctions, not a ranking of one over another, but they matter for this conversation because the new-construction pockets described above sit in specific corridors, not evenly across all three.

Ellsworth sits closer to the Peachtree Parkway side. Ward's Crossing and Bellwyn sit near the emerging Johns Creek Town Center, a 192-acre redevelopment of a former business park along Medlock Bridge Road, McGinnis Ferry Road and Johns Creek Parkway that the city has planned around a new park called the Boardwalk, according to Johns Creek's own economic development office. Medley sits at the McGinnis Ferry and Johns Creek Parkway intersection as well. A buyer who wants new construction is, in effect, choosing among a small set of corridors, not choosing freely across the whole city the way a resale buyer can.

Frequently asked questions

Does new construction in Johns Creek always cost more than resale? Not necessarily. Ellsworth's final available homes listed at or below the city's median list price. The premium shows up in single-family new construction, like Bellmoore Park, not in every new-construction option.

Why is price per square foot falling while days on market stays flat? It's consistent with a shift in what's selling rather than a drop in demand. When more of the closed sales are smaller-footprint new construction or when higher-end estate sales pause for a stretch, the per-square-foot median moves even though buyer urgency, reflected in days on market, hasn't changed.

Is there new single-family construction between $700,000 and $1.3 million? Based on current builder inventory, that band is thin. Most new single-family product either sits in the low-$700,000s at the tail end of communities like Ellsworth, or jumps to $1.3 million and above at communities like Bellmoore Park.

Reading a single median off a portal will never tell you which of these two markets you're actually shopping in. If you're comparing a resale corridor home against new construction at Ward's Crossing, Tableau at Medley, or one of the city's gated single-family enclaves, Heather Cummings can walk the tradeoffs with you street by street. Let's Connect before you tour the next one.