A For Sale sign went up in front of a little white ranch house on our evening walking route last Tuesday. By Saturday, someone had zip-tied a Pending sign across the top of it. Five days, start to finish.
That's been the pattern since we started watching the housing market around Macon a year ago. We're not touring houses yet, on purpose. We decided in January 2025 to buy by the end of 2026, and the smartest thing we've done since is watch quietly and learn what things cost here before we let ourselves walk into one.
How we've been watching
We have a saved search on our phones for anything within about 15 miles of Macon, two bedrooms or more, under $175,000. When something new comes up, I put it in a tab of the sheet called "Houses." For each listing I write down the price, bedrooms, bathrooms, square feet, year built and how many days it took to go pending. When the sold price shows up, that goes in too.
The other half of watching is just driving around. A fair number of houses here sell off a yard sign and a phone call before they ever show up online. My dad delivers propane all over the county, so he usually knows which houses are about to go up for sale before the sign does. Small towns run on that kind of information.
What a year of listings looks like
Since last April I've logged 37 listings in our range. Starter homes around here run about $120,000 to $170,000, and they fall into four rough groups.
| Kind of house | Listings | Price range | Time to pending |
|---|---|---|---|
| Updated 3-bedroom ranch | 9 | $132,000 to $152,000 | Under 2 weeks |
| Older two-story that needs work | 12 | $105,000 to $129,000 | 2 to 4 months |
| Newer or bigger, 2 baths | 8 | $155,000 to $175,000 | 1 to 2 months |
| Out in the county with acreage | 8 | $139,000 to $199,000 | All over the place |
What sold fast: anything move-in ready under $150,000 with three bedrooms and a garage. Those went pending in a week or two, a couple in under five days, and most of them sold close to asking. The kind of house we want is the kind everybody here wants.
What sat: older two-stories with original kitchens, houses in town priced over $160,000, and anything with "sold as is" in the description. Several of those cut their price by $5,000 to $10,000 and still sat for months.
What the old houses hide
Most of the houses in our range were built somewhere between the 1920s and the 1970s. Tyler is a maintenance technician who fixes things for a living, and he reads listing photos very differently than I do. Here's what he's taught me to look for.
Fresh paint in the basement. A freshly painted basement wall can mean someone is covering water stains. A dehumidifier in the corner of a photo means there's moisture down there. Neither one is a deal-breaker, but both are questions.
Old electrical. Fuse boxes and two-prong outlets show up in a lot of older houses here, and updating them isn't cheap. Tyler says some insurance companies aren't fond of them either.
The roof and the furnace. If a listing doesn't brag about a new roof or a newer furnace, we assume they're old. Out in the county, plenty of houses heat with propane, and my dad has strong opinions about what a big drafty farmhouse burns in January.
Paint and pipes. Houses built before 1978 come with a lead paint disclosure. Older plumbing can mean galvanized pipes, or clay sewer lines that tree roots love to find.
In March we sat down with a loan officer at a local bank. We learned that closing costs usually run about 3% of the price, a conventional loan can go as low as 3% to 5% down, and our area qualifies for USDA rural loans. On a $140,000 house, 5% down is $7,000 and closing costs at 3% are about $4,200. That's $11,200 before a single moving box. After that meeting we raised our goal to $35,000 by the end of this year, so we can put 10% down instead of 5%, cover the closing costs and still keep about $10,000 for whatever an older house springs on us first. We don't want to be broke the day we get the keys.
We aren't ready to buy this month, and that's all right. A year of watching has taught us what a fair price looks like here, what goes fast and what to ask when we finally walk through a front door. Sometime this fall, when the fund is closer to the goal, we'll start touring. Until then, I'll keep logging listings, and Tyler will keep zooming in on basement walls.
