See exactly how to find comparable sales in Gwinnett County: one Lawrenceville home taken through qPublic to a hearing-ready adjustment table.
# How to Find Comparable Sales in Gwinnett County (2026)
Your Gwinnett County assessment notice says your home is worth $520,000. The recent sales on your street say otherwise. That gap is your entire appeal, and comparable sales are how you prove it. This is a start-to-finish walkthrough of how to find comparable sales Gwinnett County's Board of Equalization will actually accept, using one hypothetical Lawrenceville home and the county's own free tools.
You already know comps are the evidence that decides your case. What you probably don't have yet is the county-specific mechanics: which site to search, how to define a defensible list, which sales to throw out, and how to turn raw prices into an adjusted number a board will respect. That's what the five steps below do, applied to a single property you can follow the whole way through. (If you haven't filed yet, the filing steps and 45-day deadline come first; this guide picks up after your appeal is already on file.)
You find them on qPublic, Gwinnett's free public property portal: pull your own record card, run a neighborhood sales search, keep only arm's-length sales that closed before January 1 of the tax year, screen those down to homes close to yours in size and location, then adjust each survivor for its differences. One property, five steps, no guesswork:
The subject is a Lawrenceville single-family home: 4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2,400 square feet, built in 1998, average condition. The county set its fair market value at $520,000 for 2026, which works out to roughly $217 per square foot. That sits well above what comparable Lawrenceville homes actually sold for in 2025, and that spread is exactly what the comps need to demonstrate.
Keep one number straight before you start. Georgia assesses property at 40% of fair market value (O.C.G.A. § 48-5-7), so this home's assessed value is $208,000, which is 40% of $520,000. Your comp analysis targets the full $520,000 market value, not the $208,000 assessed figure printed on the notice. Chase the assessed number and your math is wrong from the first line.
Everything starts on qPublic, the Schneider Geospatial portal that hosts Gwinnett's official property data. qPublic's real property search lets you look up a parcel by owner name, location address, parcel or property ID, account number, or legal description. Type in the subject address and open its record card.
The record card is your baseline. Read off the living area (2,400 sq ft), the year built (1998), the bed and bath count, the current appraised value, the sales history, and the neighborhood code. That neighborhood code matters more than the subdivision name. Georgia appraisers group parcels into homogeneous appraisal "neighborhoods," and that grouping is how the county decides which properties count as comparable in the first place.
One caution here. The county's record lives on qPublic, not on look-alike sites that reprint Gwinnett data without any county affiliation. And clicking your own search result opens your record card, with your sales history. It doesn't hand you neighborhood comps. Those come from separate tools in the next step.
Now define the search. qPublic has dedicated "Sales Search," "Sales List," and "Comp Search" tools, plus a "Yearly Sales" map layer, and those are what surface neighborhood sales. Run one of them around the subject property and constrain the results with four filters:
Prior-year sales carry the most weight because they're closest in time to the January 1, 2026 valuation date while still closing before it. The "6 to 12 months prior" preference you'll see quoted elsewhere is a recency convention, not the legal cutoff. The only hard line is January 1.
Screen the raw hit list and delete every sale that wasn't a true market transaction. Georgia defines fair market value as the price a knowledgeable buyer would pay a willing seller in an arm's-length, bona-fide sale (O.C.G.A. § 48-5-2), so a sale made under pressure or between insiders isn't evidence of market value. Cut these:
What's left is your candidate pool of genuine market sales. In Georgia, the most recent arm's-length sale of a property is itself the ceiling on its value for the next year, which is why a clean, well-chosen sale is the strongest single piece of evidence you can put in front of the board.
Two homes are never identical, so you adjust each comp's sale price up or down for how it differs from yours, then compare the adjusted figures. Georgia's sales-comparison approach works exactly this way: raw price first, then dollar adjustments for differences like size and condition. The state's appraisal manual endorses the method, but it doesn't set the specific dollar amounts, so the figures below are working conventions rather than statute.
The numbers here are illustrative, chosen to show the mechanics on a realistic Lawrenceville home rather than pulled from a specific closing. Size is adjusted at $50 per square foot, deliberately below the roughly $185 per square foot Lawrenceville market rate because location and base value are already captured in each sale price. You're only pricing the size difference, not the whole house again.
Read one row to see the logic. Comp A sold for $435,000 at 2,300 sq ft. It's 100 sq ft smaller than your home, so you add $5,000 to bring it up to 2,400 sq ft, then subtract $8,000 because its renovated kitchen makes it superior to yours. Its adjusted value is $432,000.
The adjusted values cluster between $432,000 and $473,500. Weighting the closest comps (A and C, nearest in size and least renovated), the indicated fair market value lands around $450,000. That's roughly a $70,000 reduction from the county's $520,000, which would pull the assessed value from $208,000 down to about $180,000.
Now look at the last column. Every comp's total adjustment stays well under 25% of its sale price. That 25% ceiling is another appraisal rule of thumb, not a legal test: a comp that needs adjustments larger than that is too dissimilar to defend, and you're better off finding a closer one.
Pick your strongest 3 to 5 adjusted comps and put them on one page: a clean table like the one above plus a short price-per-square-foot summary that lines your indicated value up against the county's. Three to five well-matched sales beat a dozen loose ones every time.
Getting this far on your own is real work, which is why the Do-It-Yourself Appeal Kit exists. For $79 it packages 2 to 5 best comparable sales, a sales map and evidence grid, a pre-written argument, and a ready-to-file appeal form, backed by a full refund if the appeal doesn't win. Either way, the finished package is what the board reads.
Keep two mechanics separate. The appeal itself is filed on Form PT-311A with the Board of Assessors online, by mail, or in person. The evidence package travels a different channel: email it to BOEEvidence@gwinnettcounty.com no less than seven days before your hearing date. Miss that seven-day window and the board may never see your comps.
At the hearing, three appointed Gwinnett citizens sit as the Board of Equalization (O.C.G.A. § 48-5-311) and rule on your value. Their decision is rendered at the conclusion of the hearing, put in writing, signed, and mailed to you. If they agree with your comps, that new value can't be raised by the assessors for the next two years either, so a strong package can lock in savings well beyond 2026.
The workflow above is deliberately Gwinnett-specific, but the bones are Georgia-wide. The January 1 valuation date, the 40% ratio, and the arm's-length rule are identical in Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, and every other county; what changes is the portal and the evidence inbox. For the underlying logic of choosing and ranking comps in any market, see the general method for finding comparable properties, and for the filing timeline and hearing process that surround this evidence, see the Gwinnett property tax appeal guide.
The effort pays. A review of 20,229 Gwinnett County appeals found an 82.2% win rate and a $15,600 median assessment reduction. If handling comps, filings, and the hearing yourself isn't how you want to spend the next few weeks, the Full-Service Appeal runs the entire appeal for 30% of your first-year savings with nothing upfront. The comps are the case; everything else is logistics.