The land developers who convert raw land into buildable residential lots have almost all gone bankrupt in the aftermath of the bursting of the housing bubble, but buyers now stand to benefit greatly from the pristine lots their efforts left behind.  This is the best time in history for buyers to not only get a great deal on developed lots in Milton, Alpharetta, and Atlanta, GA but also to capture the profits that the developers would have otherwise captured upon sale of the lots.  Many of the lots are now bank owned properties.

In Milton, GA specifically (also known as Crabapple), Artisan Custom Estates has access to 766 developed lots for our clients to choose from.  The lots range from 0.5 acres - 4+ acres and are listed for sale for as little as $60,000 - and could surely be had for less than that.  Clients contemplating custom home projects can get a significant head start on the already attractive value proposition of a new home by starting with a historic steal of amazingly good lots in Milton, Alpharetta, and well into Atlanta. 

Contact Artisan Custom Estates (404.630.1229) today to discuss available lot inventories and the relative values of over 20 different subdivisions in Milton alone.  Subdivisions include Lave Haven at Crabapple, Blue Valley, Vickery Crest, Milton Place, Bentwater Estates, Five Oaks Farm, Kingsley Estates, The Hampshires, The Hayfield, Echelon, The Oaks at Crabapple, among others.

Weeks 12 and 13 – Permitting

The septic permit with Cherokee County, GA and the construction permit have been submitted.  The permitting process is apparently an uncertain timeline and we really have just been waiting for the last several weeks.

Cherokee County Georgia has been very good to work with overall.  They have good systems and the staff are really professionals.  It makes us look forward to living in a new Cherokee County home.

Artisan Custom Estates has handled all of the submittal and direct advocacy for the Cherokee County permit process.

About Artisan Custom Estates

Artisan Custom Estates is a custom home builder in Alpharetta, Milton, and Crabapple, GA.  The North Atlanta metro area is one of the most beautiful places in America and is a great place to build a new home.  Artisan Custom Estates works directly with clients to design and build new homes in this idyllic community of great schools, open spaces, and easy living.

Weeks 10 and 11 – Finished Custom Architecture and Financing Origination

Caldwell Cline in Marietta, GA has completed our custom architecture and we feel better than ever about our future home.  Roger Caldwell was great to work with and Artisan Custom Estates provided great technical and aesthetic support throughout the architectural design and planning stage of the project.  Now that we know definitively what we plan to build, we have prepared the financing package for the bank to originate construction to permanent financing (CP Loan).  We had the financial and credit portions of the package together and submitted a couple of weeks ago but the approval was awaiting the appraisal of the architecture.

We formally placed the lot under contract after a brief sequence of back and forth with the developer.  This is a great time to be purchasing a lot parcel from a developer in the Alpharetta, GA vicinity because the market has several years of inventory.  We were able to use this leverage as part of our offer and obtain what we feel like is an excellent value in the property.  We did not retain the services of a real estate agent in this process and our project manager from Artisan Custom Estates has been a fierce advocate of our interests in the negotiations and even got us a 3% discount on our final offer since there is no buyer’s agent fee in the transaction.  Once the CP loan has been approved and is ready to close we will purchase the lot.

We finally settled on the Blackberry Ridge subdivision in Alpharetta, GA.  Blackberry Ridge is an amazing piece of property with about 40 lots of various sizes, each larger than 2 acres.  Blackberry Ridge was developed in two phases with the second phase now filling up.  The property borders the Georgia Tech Club golf course and the Echelon subdivision.  Blackberry Ridge was the perfect combination of lot size, privacy (gated community), absence of amenities, and location in Crabapple / Milton / Alpharetta, GA.

The site plan, which specifies how the architectural footprint will fit on the lot, will be finished next week and then, once the loan closes, we will be ready for Artisan Custom Estates to seek construction permits.  After that comes the part we have all been waiting for – construction!

Weeks 4 and 5 – Selecting an Architect and Lots more Lots

We officially selected an architect last week and we are very excited about working with Caldwell Cline in Marietta, Georgia.  It is a bit of hike over to the offices, but Roger Caldwell seems to have an especially good understanding of the themes we are seeking in our custom architecture.  We have already established a number of elements of the elevation such as a wrap-around front porch and a separation of the main house and the garage with a breezeway.  Caldwell Cline also has a lot of portfolio plans that represent the mix of exterior materials – we do not want just brick and stone – that we would like.  We have continued to put a lot of thought into the elements we want in our floor plan as well.  Our next meeting with the architect will be onsite once we have finalized a lot selection.

On the lot selection, after reviewing numerous options in subdivisions across Milton / Alpharetta / Crabapple, we have narrowed the lot options down to three.  Once we narrowed the option pool to three, Artisan Custom Estates assisted us in a preliminary engineering assessment of each option since significant earthwork costs can be incurred to prepare a buildable lot for construction.  My tendency is to compare the lot prices directly to one another, but I have seen that the lot preparation costs can be a significant percentage of the all-in cost to prepare to start building.  Some of the specific considerations include basement configuration (i.e. which side of the basement will be daylight), water and erosion control, and landscaping plans.  Having a builder with experience developing land has been important in this part of the process.

The ball remains in our court at this point to narrow the lot options down to one.  At that point we can get started in earnest on our custom architecture.  Then, it will seem like we are really getting somewhere. -Bill

** Artisan Custom Estates requested that one of our custom home clients document their experiences in a journal to provide a roadmap of the process for future clients to better understand what to expect from the experience.  That project is now complete and their family is now enjoying the home that they designed and constructed with Artisan Custom Estates.  We will now begin publishing the clients’ journal as a blog with some omissions to protect their privacy.  We hope you find these blog entries informative.  Please contact Artisan Custom Estates (info@artisancustomestates.com) if you would like more detail on any particular portion of the journal or the custom home process in general. **

 Week 1 – A New Opportunity

Hello!  Our names are Bill and Louise and we are residents of Atlanta.  We have spent the last several months looking for our ideal home in the North Atlanta suburbs.  Specifically, we scoured Alpharetta and Milton looking for “the one”.  As a result of our diligence, we identified a particularly ideal swath of northwest Fulton County known as Crabapple.  Ours is a common story in that we both grew up in rural settings but our professional lives led us to the city after college.  Now that we have small children, we want them to be able to enjoy a childhood in the wide-open spaces and clean air of north Georgia rather than the congestion and traffic of the metro area.

After looking at a multitude of existing homes (both new specs and resales) in our target area of Milton / Alpharetta, we assembled a great many ideas as to the attributes that we would like (and not like) in our ideal luxury home.  However, we never felt compelled to buy anything that we toured.  There was always something substantive that we would have added or changed about the home, or the home was great but the property was lacking. 

We recently took an inventory of what we had learned after a couple of months.  First, we had firmly decided on a custom home in Alpharetta / Milton area and Crabapple specifically.  Second, we knew what we were looking for in a lot: good size for a yard (1+ acre), privacy, and the ability to add a pool as the kids get older.  Finally, we knew generally what we were looking for in a custom floor plan (openness, long sight lines) as well as the style of the elevation.  It was at this point that we decided to explore the option of building a custom home in Alpharetta into which we could incorporate all of our accumulated ideas.

We then set out to identify the right Alpharetta custom home builder to transform our loosely defined vision into a reality.  A few potential luxury home builders came immediately to mind based on the homes we had already seen.  A few weeks ago, we selected Artisan Custom Estates as our builder.  We fell in love with their style, had great chemistry with the Artisan Custom Estates team, and felt good that they would be the right business partners in what will be a very significant investment.

Artisan Custom Estates has asked that we document a journal of our experience as a roadmap for other folks who are interested in building a custom home that is uniquely theirs.  Artisan estimates that the entire process including land selection, custom architecture development, and the actual construction process will take approximately one year.  So, we will call our journal “52 Weeks of Building a Custom Home in Alpharetta”. 

We are so excited to be getting started! – Bill