It’s revaluation time again in Charlotte. The process hasn’t always gone according to plan
The revaluation process is starting up again in Mecklenburg County amid still-fresh memories of problems with previous editions that proved expensive for the county and cumbersome for homeowners.
Revaluation, which determines the tax value of a property and helps determine the property taxes one pays on their property, is conducted every four years by the Mecklenburg County Assessor’s Office.
In addition to coming on the backs of previous headache-inducing cycles, this latest round of revaluation also comes amid a hot real estate market in the Charlotte area. The county has not yet released new property values, but the real estate website Zillow estimates home values in Charlotte have increased 26.6% in the last year. Since 2019, Mecklenburg County officials said the median value of residential properties has increased by 48%.
2011 revaluation leads to years of costly reviews
Charlotte’s real estate market looked different when Mecklenburg County property owners received their new property values in 2011, as the area and the rest of the country continued to recover from the Great Recession.
Tens of thousands of local property owners filed appeals of their revaluations and the public outcry over the revaluation process made headlines.
The county ultimately paid $7 million to an outside firm, Pearson’s Appraisal Services, to review the revaluation. That led to millions in refunds to property owners whose properties were found to have been overvalued, the Observer reported at the time.
The company also cited the county for dozens of issues, including not updating data cards for parcels as regularly as required. Pearson’s report prompted state legislation in 2013 that required Mecklenburg County to review, by neighborhood, the values of all parcels.
The county then paid more than $23,000 to another appraisal consultant, Josh Myers, to review both the original revaluation and Pearson’s work. Myers told county officials in 2016 that the county’s work was actually statistically better than Pearson’s, leading to further confusion and frustration.
“We paid Pearson’s $7 million to do inferior work than what the county had already done,” county Commissioner George Dunlap said at the time. “There were a few people (on the board) who listened to people in the community who were upset and at their whim caused the county to have to incur all these costs.”
Public officials who supported the review said in the wake of Myers’ report that bringing in Pearson’s was necessary to ensure public trust in the revaluation process.
Big increases and plenty of appeals in 2019
In 2019, the next edition of revaluation in Mecklenburg County saw home values skyrocket across many parts of the county, the Observer reported at the time.
The median increase in value for residential properties was 43%, Mecklenburg officials said at the time, while some neighborhoods saw average increases of more than 100%.
That raised concerns about property taxes for many homeowners, they told Observer reporters. Even some county commissioners said at the time they were “startled” by the new values.
Ultimately, the county ended up reducing more than $1 billion in property values through thousands of appeals of both residential and commercial revaluations.
“The appeals process was created because mass appraisal was an imperfect science,” attorney Larry Shaheen, Jr. told the Observer in 2019.
Mecklenburg County residents will get word of the new market value of their property in January.
Those who disagree with the figure will have the opportunity to request an “informal review” or file a “formal appeal,” according to the county Assessor’s Office.
Observer reporter Gavin Off and former Observer reporters Danielle Chemtob, Jonathan McFadden, David Perlmutt and Ely Portillo contributed archival reporting to this story.
