Two listings a half mile apart in St. Ives Country Club can tell you completely different stories about the same market. One agent will show you a median sale price of $1.6 million over the trailing 12 months, up 20 percent. Another will show you that in May 2026, the average sale price was $1.25 million, down more than a quarter from a year earlier, with homes taking nearly three times as long to sell as they had the prior May. Both numbers are real. Neither one is lying. And if you are trying to decide whether a home near Johns Creek's new Medley development is worth a premium, the gap between those two numbers is the most useful thing you will learn before you write an offer.
The numbers disagree because the sample is thin
Only five homes sold in St. Ives Country Club in May 2026, and days on market for that stretch ran to 55, up from 21 the year before. That is not a large enough pool to draw a trend line from, but it is exactly the kind of pool that produces headline-grabbing percentage swings. A single dated interior or an unusually motivated seller can move an average by double digits when you are only averaging five sales. Meanwhile the trailing 12-month median, which smooths over a full year of closings, tells a steadier story of appreciation.
The lesson isn't that one source is right and the other is wrong. It's that in a neighborhood with a limited number of annual transactions, what moves the number most is which specific homes happened to close, not some external event like a development a mile down the road. A renovated kitchen and a golf course view will always out-earn a listing's marketing copy about "proximity to Medley," at least until Medley is something you can actually walk to.
What Medley actually is, and when it actually opens
Medley is the 43-acre, $560 million mixed-use project Toro Development Company is building at Johns Creek Parkway and McGinnis Ferry Road, the same team behind Avalon in Alpharetta. The scale of the ambition is real. The delivery timeline is longer than the marketing suggests, and that gap matters if you are deciding what to pay today for something that opens tomorrow.
| Phase | What it includes | When it lands |
|---|---|---|
| Retail and restaurants | Trader Joe's (already open), Fadó Irish Pub, Shake Shack, CRÚ Food & Wine Bar, Northern China Eatery, and more than 30 other signed concepts | Opening through fall 2026, grand opening October 29 |
| Prelude apartments | 340 luxury rental units | First residents move in November 1, 2026 |
| Tableau at Medley townhomes | 133 for-sale townhomes starting at $700,000-plus | Not yet on the market; interest list only as of this writing |
| Encore | 408 additional apartments and 20,000 more square feet of retail | 2027 |
| Boutique hotel | 150-key hotel operated by Mainsail Lodging & Development | 2028 |
Read that table the way an economist would rather than the way a leasing brochure wants you to. As of today, roughly two months from the grand opening, you can buy groceries at Trader Joe's and eventually rent an apartment at Prelude. You cannot yet buy a townhome inside Medley itself. The full 881-unit residential build, the second retail wave, and the hotel that's supposed to complete the "third place" experience won't exist for another one to two years. If a listing agent is pricing a nearby home as though Medley is finished, they are pricing in something that is, at best, half built.
The developer's own comparison sets the realistic timeline
Toro Development's chief vision officer, Mark Toro, has repeatedly pointed to Avalon in Alpharetta as proof of concept, noting that Avalon's for-sale homes appreciated well beyond the surrounding region after its 2014 and 2016 phases opened. That comparison is worth taking seriously, because it's the same team applying the same model. It is also worth reading carefully, because Avalon's appreciation didn't happen in the first two months after opening. Its first phase completed in 2014, its second in 2016, and today, a decade later, Avalon townhomes are trading well into seven figures. The value did materialize. It simply took years of a fully built, fully leased district before the surrounding comps caught up.
If Medley follows a similar arc, the realistic window for a measurable price effect on nearby Johns Creek resales starts closer to Encore's 2027 delivery and the hotel's 2028 opening, not the October 2026 ribbon cutting. Buying today on the assumption that proximity alone locks in tomorrow's premium skips over the part of the story where the premium actually gets built.
Which neighborhoods are close enough to feel it first
Geography matters here more than marketing language does. The established communities closest to the Johns Creek Parkway and McGinnis Ferry Road intersection, including Medlock Bridge, Huntington, Belmore Park, Sugar Mill, and St. Ives Country Club, are the ones positioned to see any Medley-driven appreciation earliest, simply because they're the ones within comfortable walking or short-drive distance once the full build-out is finished. Homes several miles away in other parts of the city are unlikely to see the same effect regardless of how a listing description frames it.
Citywide, Johns Creek's median sale price was $700,000 in February 2026, with homes averaging 36 days on market, which gives you a baseline for comparing any specific listing against the broader city rather than against a single hot pocket. New construction in Johns Creek is limited by available land, which tends to support resale values across the board and gives sellers in older, well-maintained homes near Medley an argument that has nothing to do with the development at all.
A view of a construction site is not the same asset as a view of a finished plaza, and the price difference between the two should show up in your offer.
A practical filter for comparing two similar listings
If you're weighing two homes that look alike on paper and one is marketed as closer to Medley, ask the agent directly which phase they're pricing against. A home priced as though the hotel, the full retail build, and Tableau's townhomes already exist is asking you to pay for 2028 today. A home priced against what's actually open this fall, meaning a grocery store, a handful of restaurants, and one apartment building, is a more honest comparison, and probably a better value if the long-term upside still matters to you.
Pull the actual sold comps for the specific subdivision over the trailing 12 months rather than relying on a single month's average, especially in lower-volume luxury pockets like St. Ives Country Club where five sales can swing a headline number by 20 points in either direction. And ask what condition those comps were in. In a market where the amenity story is still incomplete, kitchen and bathroom updates are doing more of the pricing work than a mile marker on a map.
A few questions worth asking before you write an offer
Will homes near Medley definitely be worth more once it's finished? No one can promise that, and this isn't financial advice. What the Avalon comparison shows is a plausible pattern, not a guarantee, and it took years to play out even in a market the same developer already proved could work.
Is buying near Medley now a bad idea if I want the long-term upside? Not necessarily. It just means you should price the home on what exists today, not on what the marketing implies will exist in 2028, and treat any future appreciation as a bonus rather than something already baked into today's asking price.
Does the drop in St. Ives Country Club's average sale price mean the neighborhood is declining? The data doesn't support that conclusion. A thin sample of five May sales moved a monthly average sharply, while the trailing 12-month median for the same neighborhood was up 20 percent. Both numbers are accurate reflections of a low-volume luxury market, not a sign of a neighborhood in trouble.
When will Medley actually feel finished? Retail and the first apartments open this fall, with the grand opening on October 29, 2026. Encore's second residential phase and additional retail follow in 2027. The hotel completes the vision in 2028. Full build-out realistically runs another year and a half to two years from today.
If you're comparing homes near Johns Creek's Town Center corridor and want a read on what a specific address is actually worth against real, recent comps rather than proximity marketing, Patricia Mickle can walk through the numbers with you. Let's Connect.
