If they knew what’s coming, many property owners in Guilford and 22 other North Carolina counties wouldn’t want to open letters arriving soon from their from tax departments.
Tax officials are reappraising residential and commercial real estate to meet the state requirement that assessed values of property can’t fall below 85% of their sales values. As real estate prices surged during the pandemic, it pushed the sales ratio below the threshold for properties in counties including Guilford. That forced Tax Director Ben Chavis to undertake the reappraisal of 220,000 properties in the state’s third-most populous county.
The letters for Guilford’s residential reappraisals are scheduled to go out Feb. 17; the correspondence for commercial reappraisals a month later. Meanwhile, Chavis is briefing the County Commission, the Greensboro Regional Realtors Association and others about the reappraisal.
Chavis is asking for help sharing accurate information. Assessed values are increasing, on average, by 40% to 45% in Guilford, while some social media posts have reported inaccurate estimates of 50% or more.
The reappraisals in Guilford reflect higher sales prices for property. In housing, the average sales price increased to $391,354 this past September from $338,124 three years earlier. New valuations vary, depending partly upon sales trends in different areas, according to Chavis.
While the tax department determined the new values, elected officials in Guilford, Greensboro and smaller towns have an option to reduce their municipalities’ tax rates and, in turn, maintain or lower property tax bills.
“We will accept one half of the blame,’’ Chavis told the real estate group earlier this week.
Unhappy property owners have until May 15 to appeal their reappraisals. Their tax bills come due in Sept. 1 and become delinquent in January 2027, Chavis said.
Guilford follows a schedule to reappraise its property on a five-year cycle. However, the accelerating sales prices triggered the reassessment a year earlier. Chavis presented the bright side of the earlier accounting.
“It creates a lot of financial uncertainty for many families when you have a longer cycle…when the values tend to jump up and folks. … are just not ready to absorb that,’’ he said.
“When you’ve got substantial growth, it leads to rising values and, of course, sticker shock. What we want to do is reduce that sticker shock, and one of the ways to do that is do a more frequent cycle.’’
North Carolina requires reappraisals every eight years, though Mecklenburg and others do them on a shorter cycles. Last March, Wake County approved a two-year cycle, effective next January. That avoids major surprises, and gets money quicker to the government if property values increase.
Guilford’s previous reappraisal in 2022 generated many questions from property owners, recalls Bill Warmath, president of the Greensboro Realtors group. This time, the higher valuations are colliding with the difficulty for some people to afford to buy a house.
“It’s coming at a difficult time in the market,’’ he said Thursday.
