Property
Taxes
County officials across the state are grappling with the
prospect of conducting property revaluations that would significantly reduce
their property tax base, which could force them to hike the tax rate to keep
revenue steady. Counties are required to revalue property at least once every
eight years, a process designed to make sure the tax burden is being equitably
distributed among all property owners. The tax value is set roughly at market
value, but that market value can fluctuate significantly in the years between
revaluations. For counties that experienced large amounts of speculative
building and conducted revaluations at or near the peak of the market, the
decline in real estate values posed a number of challenges. During the boom
years, new high-end homes experienced the greatest appreciation in value. But
since the bubble burst, many of those same homes are depreciating much faster
than other sectors of the market. “How do you explain to the public we’re
lowering your (property) value but raising your tax rates?” said Frank Clifton,
Orange County’s town manager, summing up the tricky political problem
revaluations now pose. The solution for 27 North Carolina counties has been to
delay the revaluations by anywhere from one to four years, but such action has
drawn criticism, particularly since many counties had reduced the time between
revaluations to four years to capture appreciation in the marketplace. “It’s
all about equity and truth,” said Gary Phillips, owner of Weaver Street Realty
in Carrboro and a former Chatham County commissioner. “Once you make that
commitment to do them every four years, they ought to be done every four years
because the entire community needs to know what that snapshot looks like.”
Under a state law passed in 2008, any county with more than 75,000 residents
whose median sales values differ more than 15 percent from tax values must
perform a revaluation within three years. Only Union County has so far met the
criteria; its median sales price was 20 percent below tax value this year.
Marcus Kinrade, Wake County’s
revenue director, said if all sectors of the market are falling by equal
amounts compared to their tax value, there isn’t really a problem in delaying a
revaluation. “But if the high-end homes are selling significantly less compared
to the tax value than the low-end homes, than you’ve got an equalization
problem,” he said. “The burden of the tax is unfair” to those high-end
homeowners whose property is now worth much less than its current tax value.
Although the state puts out annual estimates showing the ratio of each county’s
median sales price to its tax values, getting a clear picture on how much the
two are diverging is tricky. One problem is that there have been far fewer
property sales since the bust. When doing a revaluation, counties are supposed
to use only sales in which there is a willing buyer and seller, meaning
foreclosures and short sales are not to be included. This has only added to the
disconnect between market and tax values, as a homeowner in a neighborhood riddled
with foreclosures is likely to wonder why his or her tax value does not reflect
all those distressed sales. The lack of qualified sales also can play havoc
with commercial property assessments. “The biggest problem that we still had,
even delaying it two years, was the lack of qualified sales,” said Shane
Mitchell, chairman of the Franklin County Board of Commissioners.(David
Bracken, THE NEWS & OBSERVER, 9/02/12).
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