Jack Crews is watching his neighborhood on the south side of Kernersville change from fields and houses to offices and businesses.
But he still got a shock when he got his revaluation notice earlier this year. His property value had risen from about $190,000 to $700,000. His mother’s property, right next door on N.C. 66, rose from about $127,000 to $950,000.
“We took it personally,” Crews said. “We thought they were targeting our community specifically. As we got information from the tax office it became clear that they are doing this all over the county.”
To Crews, it looked as if his tax values were going up because of the commercial development nearby. On top of that, he said, Forsyth County was wrong to even try to do a revaluation when the economy has been doing so badly.
“Why does residential property have to go up so high just because there is commercial close by?” Crews said.
The Winston-Salem Journal reported that the catch for some taxpayers is that people have bought residential land in the area at high prices, perhaps with the thought of turning the land into commercial development at some other time. That’s pushing land values higher — even for people who are still living in their homes and have no plans to sell.
“It certainly is a changing area,” said Pete Rodda, the county tax assessor. “We are not trying to penalize anybody, but we have to take the market as we find it. There are sales in the area. We have to follow our schedule of values. If it says that residential property is to be valued at ‘x’ we have to value it as ‘x.”‘
County officials say that the law is clear: they must value property according to market values. And they say they are not basing residential valuations on the value of nearby commercial real estate. Instead, the values that the county assigned are based on nearby sales of residential property.
Crews and others will soon have a public meeting at Southeast Middle School. He said he wants to tell other citizens about what he’s found out about the revaluation process. Crews said that he and about 10 other homeowners in the Bunker Hill community are displeased with revaluation.
Crews did appeal his and his mother’s property valuations during the informal appeals period this spring.
As a result, the county lowered the value on Crews’ property to about $460,000, and lowered the value on his mother’s property to about $330,000.
Crews is still not satisfied. He is in line to have his case heard by the county’s board of equalization and review — the panel set up by the county to formally adjudicate valuation disputes.
In looking at the Crewses’ properties during the informal appeals period, county officials realized that they needed to re-examine the whole neighborhood. Although some like the Crewses were left with lower values than they had initially, others wound up with higher values.
The assessor’s office was able to lower the values on the two Crews properties because of the way the land is configured, said John Burgiss, the real-estate manager in the assessor’s office. Parts of the tracts farther from the roadway were assigned lower values because of that fact.
What seems apparent, Burgiss said, is that people are “buying dirt and not necessarily the structure” when they acquire residential land in the neighborhood. In the case of one residential sale in the neighborhood that the county looked at, a property was bought for $250,000 in 2006 and the house demolished within less than a year. In another case, a buyer spent about $490,000 for a residential tract that was vacant because the house had burned and had been removed.
Burgiss said that the assessor’s office took that into account when trying to come up with a proper value for houses in the neighborhood. For instance, Jack Crews’ house is valued at only $16, with almost all of the property’s assessed value in the land itself.
“The intent was to not have money on the houses because in my opinion the market was paying for the dirt,” Burgiss said. It wasn’t to say that Crews’ house was a bad one, because it is not, Burgiss said.
County Commissioner Ted Kaplan called the Crews case “one of those unique situations” because of the house’s location in a developing area.
“You hope your property is worth more than you paid for it, but when it happens and you are not ready to move you end up with this problem,” Kaplan said.
Commissioner Debra Conrad, who plans to attend the meeting at Southeast Middle School, said she simply wants to hear the citizens’ concerns and answer any questions she can. Conrad was on the short end of a 4-3 vote earlier in the year that kept the revaluation schedule in place. Some North Carolina counties stopped revaluation efforts in progress, despite legal opinions that they couldn’t do that.
Forsyth County took the wrong approach, Crews said.
“Everybody’s taxes went up in the worst economy since 1939,” he said.
Topics North Carolina Property
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