As Mecklenburg County continues to sort through remaining appeals from the 2011 property revaluation, officials are pitching a new way of setting a date for the next one.

The proposal could mean revaluations are done more frequently than the eight years between the last two. It also might make property owners less likely to see big jumps or declines in values between appraisals.

So, when can you expect a new revaluation?

No date has been set, but the county is recommending that future revaluations be scheduled based on Mecklenburg's score on an annual state report that looks at how close property assessments are to actual sales during the preceding year.

Once the county hits certain triggers, an appraisal would take place within two years, Cary Saul, director of the county's Land Use & Environmental Services Agency told county commissioners recently.

Commissioners could vote on the new proposal in March. If approved, the system would get its first test a month later, when the state sends out the annual assessment-to-sales ratio report.

But Saul said it was unlikely the upcoming report would show that Mecklenburg needs to do another revaluation right away.

State law requires counties to reset property values at least once every eight years. The Legislature passed a measure last summer to require them more frequently in some cases.

Assessment-to-sales ratio

Both the county proposal and new state law rely on a report published each spring by the N.C. Department of Revenue. The assessment-to-sales ratio report is based on a random sampling of 400 sales in a county in a year and compares them to the property's assessed value.

A lower score means properties are selling for more than their assessed value, while any score above 100 means the median county assessments are higher than sales prices.

Mecklenburg scored a 96 on the most recent state report, which considered assessments from the 2011 revaluation.

Saul said the county has never exceeded 100 percent on the state report in the past two decades.

The county is proposing that a revaluation be done within two years of Mecklenburg County either falling below 92 percent, or exceeding 108 percent, on the state report.

At the county's recent strategic planning conference, Commissioner Bill James questioned whether it was appropriate to use the state report in setting the revaluation schedule. He said the state report considers only certain sales and excludes foreclosures and other distressed transactions in the market.

James said he'd like to see a change in state law to allow the distressed sales to be used in setting the new values.

The new county proposal also requests that $500,000 be set aside each year to help pay for a revaluation, though that figure could be adjusted as needed. It costs about $2 million to conduct the mass appraisals.