Home services marketing in Savannah

Savannah is a single Census metro covering Bryan, Chatham and Effingham counties. On ACS 2020–2024 five-year estimates the city records a median year of construction of 1971 against the metro's 1992, a gap of twenty-one years.

The city holds 55.9% single-family detached and 45.4% owner-occupancy, with median household income of $57,137. The metro reads 64.7%, 62.2% and $77,180. The city is majority-renter, roughly $20,000 poorer per household, and old enough that re-roofing, re-piping and panel upgrades are standing work rather than occasional jobs.

One assumption worth discarding: this is not a seasonal market. Despite Tybee Island, seasonal and occasional-use units are 2.8% of the metro stock, against 18.8% in Myrtle Beach on the same table.

Climate runs marginally hotter than Charleston at 1,811 heating degree days against 2,458 cooling, against Charleston's 1,977 and 2,304.

Savannah runs two separate historic review bodies with different jurisdictions, and confusing them costs weeks.

The Historic District Board of Review, created in 1973, covers the Savannah Downtown Historic Overlay District, the area designated a National Historic Landmark District by the Secretary of the Interior in 1966. The Historic Preservation Commission, created on 18 July 2019 under the Georgia Historic Preservation Act, covers all other local historic districts, historic properties and conservation districts, and its own bylaws exclude the Downtown overlay by name. Victorian District, Mid-City and Cuyler-Brownville sit with the Commission rather than the Board.

Both issue a certificate of appropriateness, and the trade work each catches is specific. Roof repair and replacement, windows and doors, siding, and mechanical screening are staff-level reviews. Fences and gates go to full board review. Three or more staff-review items on one application escalates the whole thing to the board, and work on a non-contributing structure is automatically a board review.

The Board meets on the second Wednesday of the month at one o'clock. The submission deadline is one full month ahead, by three in the afternoon. City ordinance 3.19.4a also requires a pre-application conference with Metropolitan Planning Commission staff before any board-review certificate is submitted, held at least one week before that deadline.

Add it up for a fence. Pre-application conference, deadline a week later, meeting a month after that, and only then a permit application. Five weeks before permitting starts, on a job a crew installs in two days.

Fees run from $25 on work up to $2,500 to $1,500 at the top of the scale, and work done before approval doubles the filing fee. A contractor who starts a historic-district re-roof assuming the permit will follow is buying both the doubled fee and the delay.

Georgia sits in a third position. Texas and Tennessee let local jurisdictions adopt their own code editions. The Carolinas run statewide codes that locals may not exceed. Georgia makes nine codes mandatory statewide and, in the Department of Community Affairs' own words, any structure built in Georgia must comply whether or not the local government chooses to locally enforce them.

Licensing is a separate matter and it catches people out. Georgia licenses conditioned air, electrical and plumbing contractors with no dollar threshold at all, and licenses residential contractors above $2,500. It does not license roofing or fencing at state level.

One useful exemption in the city's own tree ordinance, adopted 16 March 2017: protected trees on developed property are those twelve inches or more in diameter, except on single-family residential lots. That carve-out removes a permitting step from most residential yard work here, and it is the opposite of Atlanta, where a pre-submittal arborist meeting gates residential permits.