§ 9-12-84.When money judgment against nonresident creates lien on land within state against third parties without notice

When the defendant lives outside Georgia, the usual approach of docketing in the "county of the defendant's residence" has no obvious answer — there is no Georgia county of residence to use. Subsection (a) fills that gap for real estate: as against good-faith third parties without notice who acquire a transfer or lien on Georgia real estate owned by a nonresident, a money judgment against that nonresident creates no lien on the real estate unless the execution is entered on the general execution docket of the county where the real estate is located. Once entered, the lien dates from that entry.

Subsection (b) then draws a clear boundary around what the recording rule protects. It affects only whether the lien can be enforced against outside third parties who bought or took a lien on the property without notice. It has no bearing on the judgment's validity or force between the plaintiff and the nonresident defendant themselves — that judgment remains fully effective between them regardless of whether the execution was ever docketed.

Read together with the article's other docketing provisions, this section shows how Georgia adapts the same underlying notice principle to a defendant who has property in the state but no residence in it: the county where the property sits substitutes for the county of residence used elsewhere in the article.