An angry crowd accused Haywood County commissioners this week of unfairly slapping some property owners with higher values while letting others off the hook in the recent countywide appraisal.

About 50 people turned out at the commissioners meeting Monday to complain that appraisers had botched up when assessing their properties. At best, they blamed commissioners for being complicit in an erroneous property revaluation — and at worst for being part of a conspiracy to target certain property owners with deliberately inflated values.

Commissioner Mark Swanger explained that commissioners don’t have a role in revaluation. Revaluation is conducted by appraisers, who examine the prevailing real estate market to arrive at new property values.

Since property values determine how much you pay in property taxes, the biggest fear from the audience was that their taxes would go up as a result of higher property values.

“There are people who don’t have extra money in their pocket to keep on donating to taxes,” said Horace Edwards of Cruso, who helped organize the turnout.

Generally real estate increases in value a little every year. But given the depressed market, many homes have stagnated in value and others have even gone down.

Yet half the property owners in the county saw an increase in value since the last countywide appraisal five years ago. And that’s what Jonnie Cure said she doesn’t understand. How could anyone’s have gone up?

“What has happened in Haywood County? I simply don’t get it. It is truly incredible,” Cure said.

Yvonne Mazet, who lives in a single-wide trailer, said she can hardly afford her taxes now, let alone now that her property values have gone up.

“I don’t feel my taxes should have gone up,” Mazet said. “I don’t think in this economic era we are using our heads very well. I think this is a very bad choice to re-evaluate our property.”

Commissioner Kirk Kirkpatrick said the purpose of a revaluation is not to force higher taxes on anyone.

“Our goal in this process is not to raise people’s taxes. It is to make sure the values are fair when we apply the tax rate,” Kirkpatrick said.

Edwards said it isn’t fair that more expensive homes have dropped in value, while lower or median priced ones increased. Edwards implored commissioners to use the weight of their office to “take some action and fix it.”

But the county is required to base values on comparable sales of similar property.

If expensive homes aren’t selling for as much as they used to, the county appraisers had no choice but to decrease the value of those homes to reflect selling prices the real world.

“We cannot choose to violate the law. That is not an option for us,” Swanger said.

Denny King questioned whether the appraisers accurately pegged market values, however.

“The real test for appraisals is if you put the property up for sale would they sell within a reasonable amount of time for the appraised value?” asked King, who ran for county commissioner as a Tea Party supporter last fall but lost.

Justin Hensley said he never saw an appraiser.

“No one came to our house. I don’t know how they came up with these numbers. You can’t fly over in an airplane and come up with this stuff. It is really unfair and it is totally unaccurate,” Hensley said.

Appraisers indeed visited each parcel, but they do not come inside and usually don’t get out of the car.

In Haywood County, it has been five years since the last revaluation. Counties are required to do one at least every eight. Some speakers questioned why the county didn’t wait another three years.

Jack Wadham said large numbers of people might refuse to pay their property taxes and sue the county over the revaluation. As long as the lawsuit was pending, they wouldn’t have to pay, he said, and the county would go broke waiting to collect taxes.

“That is not a threat. That is just telling you what could really happen,” Wadham said.

The crowd applauded after most of the speakers, occasionally offering up a standing ovation, but did not get unruly.

When public comment concluded, commissioners started to respond to the crowd’s concerns, but the audience got up and walked out, at first one by one, then en masse, in an obvious flout to the commissioners’ attempts to explain the revaluation.

Several in the audience told commissioners the revaluation would cost them their seats in the next election.

“It was kind of convenient that you did not do this on an election year,” said Cure. “I am sure you are hoping we forget you did it by 2012.”

Swanger repeatedly urged those who complained about their property values to appeal. The first step is to make an appointment with the county’s property appraisal office. The appraisers will share how they arrived at the property value, generally by citing the price fetched by similar property that was sold. The property owner can then explain why they believe the value is wrong.

David Francis, head of the county tax department, said the appeal process works. He shared an example from one property owner who has utility lines on their property that would hurt its selling price. The county appraiser agreed and adjusted the value accordingly.

“I know there is a lot of frustration out there. Give us a chance to sit down and explain it to you,” Francis said.

 

What is property revaluation?

In North Carolina, counties are required to conduct a mass appraisal of real estate at least every eight years. Property taxes are based on property values.

The reval is intended to level the playing field, bringing the county’s assessed value of a particular property in line with the true market value so everyone is paying a fair share come tax day.

In Haywood County, the total value of all property remained flat. If you add it all up — the value of every home, lot and tract of land — it amounts to $6.791 billion, an increase of less than one percent over last year’s total value of $6.787 billion. Roughly half the property owners saw their values go up, while half saw their values go down.

When property goes up across the board in a revaluation, the county typically lowers the tax rate to offset what would otherwise be an increase in property taxes. This time, since there was no net gain in the property tax base, the tax rate will likely remain about the same, and whether your individual taxes go up or down will likely depend on how your property values performed.

This isn’t the easiest time to be a real estate agent in Jackson and Macon counties, not with the crippled housing market and a customer base that is, in most cases, hard pressed to find the dollars to buy new homes.

Nowhere is it tougher than the upscale communities of Cashiers and Highlands, a market catering to second- and third-home owners. Here, where houses just a few years ago routinely sold in the millions, the bottom has fallen out.

Terry Potts isn’t complaining. But, as the owner of four separate real estate offices in Highlands alone, Potts perhaps is experiencing even greater pain than most agents.

“In most cases, property has been selling for about half the tax value,” Potts said of the market in Highlands, adding that what has sold are, generally, bank foreclosures.

“I think that’s why they put it off,” Potts said. “And I do think the values are going to drop a good bit — if they truly use values of (properties) that have sold.”

“It” would be the property revaluations, now scheduled to take place in both Jackson and Macon counties in 2013. Countywide appraisals were last conducted in Jackson in 2008 and Macon in 2007, at practically the peak of the housing boom in Western North Carolina.

Macon County commissioners decided to postpone its revaluation from 2011 to 2013; and Jackson County recently opted to push its back one-year from 2012 to 2013. State law mandates revaluation takes place at least every eight years; both counties had been on four-year cycles.

The issue?

 

‘True’ market value

In both counties, the tax assessors predicted difficulties with calculating true market value when little property has sold. Bobby McMahan, Jackson County’s tax assessor, recently told commissioners one township with 4,000 parcels had just three property sales in three years — hardly enough to establish a baseline.

McMahan wanted commissioners to delay Jackson County’s revaluation until 2015. This would have meant, however, that taxpayers would continue paying taxes for several additional years on what are now hyper-assessed properties. Some residents, particularly those living in southern Jackson County, cried foul — and not just over the possibility of shouldering an unfairly large tax burden, but about the overall level of services the Cashiers area receives back.

“The emotional irritation is that there is a miniscule percentage coming back to southern Jackson County and these townships,” said Phillip Rogers, who lives near Cashiers in the Hamburg Township.

“I’m personally contributing property taxes on two houses … I don’t mind paying the taxes as much as I mind not getting a return on services,” Rogers said.

But even if property values are lowered, it’s unlikely to provide residents such as Rogers tax relief, as he knows. In light of falling property values, Jackson and Macon counties would have to raise the tax rate if they want to bring in the same amount of money.

“That’s true,” agreed interim Jackson County Manager Chuck Wooten of the options facing local leaders. “In order to be revenue neutral there would have to be an increase.”

Wooten estimated that staying revenue neutral in Jackson County would require a tax-rate increase of the current 28 cents per $100 valuation to the mid-30s.

The largest drop in property values, not surprisingly, is expected in the Glenville and Cashiers area — the same areas where they had risen so rapidly over the first part of the decade.

Norman West, a longtime real-estate agent, primarily works in Cullowhee, the fastest growing part of the county population-wise, according to the 2010 Census.

Even so, things aren’t good, West said, “but we tend to be a little more insulated than some other communities” because of Western Carolina University.

West said what Jackson County has yet to truly contend with is the crash of high-end developments — granted, many lots in such developments already have been through foreclosure, but he believes there are many more to come. The fallout from the Great Recession isn’t over.

“These are uncharted waters,” West said.

 

Things that roll downhill

Jack Debnam, a real-estate agent who serves as chairman of the Jackson County Board of Commissioners, acknowledged local leaders have been placed in an unenviable position.

To offset the lower property values when revaluation starts in 2013, they will either have to raise taxes or cut county services.

Commissioners might face that dilemma sooner than 2013, however. The county already faces a budget shortfall. Wooten has asked each department to cut 5 percent from their budgets in the coming fiscal year.

There is every likelihood state leaders will shift portions of the $2.4 billion budget deficit they are facing downhill to local governments. After that, there’s nowhere downhill to go — again, local leaders are left to slash services or raise taxes.

“We just don’t know where the state’s going to put us,” Debnam said.

In Macon County, Bob Holt, a Franklin resident and real-estate instructor for Southwestern Community College, said during the first quarter of this year, sale prices were running at 63 percent of the assessed value. He expects to see values drop after this evaluation.

Richard Lightner, Macon County’s tax assessor, said his office could ask commissioners to delay the revaluation again, up to 2015, but that he doesn’t plan to do that.

“I think we need to adjust to where reality is right now,” Lightner said. “The whole premise of doing a revaluation is to equalize the market values.”

Lightner said the lower- and median-priced homes are generally stable — it’s the high end, speculative markets that are down.

While some counties bring in a specialized appraisal firm to conduct the revaluation, others do it in-house with their own staff. Macon County has done theirs in-house in the past, but Jackson is contemplating bringing the reval in-house for the first time.

Lightner said Jackson is likely to “have a difficult time” if it does. Macon is well along in the revaluation process — some 30 percent of property values are done. Jackson is just starting.

Additionally, Macon has experience doing revaluations in-house; Jackson County does not.

“They’re starting from scratch right now,” Lightner said. “I wouldn’t want to do one like that.”

If Jackson commissioners insist on sticking to its target of 2013, Lightner said he expects Jackson County tax-office staff will be unable to make as many on-site evaluations as Macon County, and instead will be forced to rely more on computer-generated assessments.

Haywood County’s property revaluation was a massive undertaking: appraisers had to lay eyes on 50,000 properties, from condos to fast-food joints to farms, and judge whether they had gone up or down in value over the past five year.

Hundreds of property sales from 2009 and 2010 set the bar for new values on the county’s property rolls. But just because a similar home across town sold for $200,000, does it mean yours would also?

In the world of real estate, location is everything, whether it’s a few blocks down or the other side of the ridge.

This year, the county developed a highly-engineered method called “neighborhood delineation.”

The formula carves the county up into nearly 1,000 neighborhoods. From there, the county essentially wrote its own computer program to calculate property values, taking dozens of variables into account. Each variable takes the value up or down a notch, but is only as good as the baseline assigned to the neighborhood.

The methodology is impressive, said Randy Siske, a Realtor and president of the Haywood County Board of Realtors.

“The last time we had a revaluation, the biggest complaint from the real estate community was they were comparing apples and oranges,” Siske said. “I think they really made an effort to compare apples and apples.”

Before, the county was divided into just 17 townships. All of Maggie Valley was lumped together, or all of Bethel.

Now, clusters of just 30 or 40 similar properties make up a neighborhood.

David Francis, Haywood County tax collector, pointed to a map of Hazelwood where a conspicuous donut hole appears in the middle of one neighborhood. A condo unit along a residential street was carved out and made its own “neighborhood” rather than lumping it in with the houses around it.

“That’s how close and how drilled down this is,” Francis said.

When county’s appraisal team reached the final stage of revaluation — a drive-by of every property on the books to double check their formulas — they had identified some 700 neighborhoods. But during their final drive-bys they kept creating more and more.

One appraiser trolling the back roads of Fines Creek left in the morning to survey what she thought was one neighborhood and came back to the office with three: Betsy’s Gap, Price Town and Turkey Creek.

“They were finding out that some neighborhoods were a little broad so they broke them down further,” said Haywood County Tax Assessor Judy Ballard said.

And further and further apparently, until they had added another 250 neighborhoods by the time reval was done.

“Neighborhood delineation” was lot of work on the front end — entering not just the number of bedrooms, square footage and whether a home has a garage — but also the school district, proximity to town parks or mountain views.

Those appealing their property values may have a harder time making their case.

“I think it is going to be more difficult for property owners to get through the appeal process,” Siske said. “I’m not saying there aren’t properties out there that need to be appealed. But finding a property that is $100,000 off in value I think it is very much less likely.”

Property owners in Haywood County faced a Catch 22 when their new property values arrived in the mail last week.

If your value went up, it’s nice to know the lackluster real estate market didn’t undermine your home’s worth. The downside will be higher property taxes. Those who saw their value go down will likely pay less in taxes — but it’s hard to be excited that your home isn’t worth as much as it used to be.

The total value of property in the county remained flat. If you add it all up — the value of every home, lot and tract of land — it amounts to $6.791 billion, an increase of less than 1 percent over last year’s total value of $6.787 billion.

The flat figures mean the county escaped the brunt of the national real estate downturn. As a result, the county won’t have to hike the property tax rate to bring in the same amount of money as last year.

“I am relieved there were no gigantic swings,” Commissioner Mark Swanger said.

Had property values gone down as a whole, the tax rate would have to go up for the county to collect the same amount as last year. Commissioners would be hard-pressed to explain the nuance of raising the tax rate, but not really raising taxes given lower property values.

Commissioners have been sparred that dilemma, but only to some degree.

Unfortunately, Swanger pointed out that sales tax collected by the county might be down as consumers are buying less. And the state is poised to stick the county with more of the tab for everything from road paving to education, Swanger said.

Commissioners may be faced with raising property taxes to make up for these shortfalls — unless they want to cut the county’s budget for the third year in a row, something that may not be possible, they said.

“We have already reduced it almost as much as we possibly can,” said Commissioner Kirk Kirkpatrick.

If the state cuts education, does the county hang the schools out to dry or pick up the cost locally?

“We have to wait and see what Raleigh does and then decide as a community and as commissioners, what do people want? What do you want your government to do?” Kirkpatrick said.

Those tough decisions will be facing the county over the next few months. A budget — and tax rate — will be hashed out by July 1 when the new fiscal year starts. Then, and only then, can homeowners pull out their calculators and know for sure what their new property values will mean for their tax bill.

 

Why the revaluation?

In North Carolina, counties are required to conduct a mass appraisal of real estate every eight years — called a revaluation, or “reval” for short. Property taxes are based on property values — the more your property is worth the more taxes you pay. The reval is intended to level the playing field, bringing the county’s assessed value of your property in line with the true market value so everyone is paying their fair share come tax day.

 

How do you calculate taxes?

Here’s how to figure county taxes at the current tax rate at 51.4 cents for every $100 of property value. Divide your property value by $100 then multiply by 0.514. This doesn’t include fire taxes for your fire district or town taxes if you live in the town limits. Bear in mind commissioners won’t set this year’s final tax rate until June.

When Mollie Weaver put her house on the market two weeks ago, she was bracing for the worst. She’d been here before, for two years in fact, when her house languished on the market from 2007 to 2009.

“Of course that was when things were rapidly changing,” Weaver said. “We learned from that.”

This time, the mom of three got serious.

“In the higher price ranges, there is stiff competition. There are brand new homes that haven’t sold, and if you can’t compete with that you have to slash down your price,” Weaver said.

ALSO: New values based on hyperlocal formula

So she did, and Weaver’s house in the Iron Duff area of Haywood County was under contract within a day.

She’s selling at a loss compared to where she bought it in 2006, but hopes to make up the difference when she finds a new house: “We sell at a bargain and we buy at bargain.”

Weaver’s story sounds familiar to anyone who’s tried to buy or sell and home in the mountains.

But now for the first, time there are hard-and-fast numbers painting a full picture of real estate values in Haywood County.

Every home, lot and tract of land in the county — all 50,000 of them — have been reappraised to reflect the current real estate market. New values were sent to property owners last week, and many learned their property was worth less than the last countywide appraisal five years ago.

In the past, you could count on values to go up with the exercise. But it’s a different ball game this time, and many anticipated a dramatic decline in property values.

Nationally, the recession has wreaked havoc on the real estate market. A glut of homes coupled with a dearth of buyers forced sellers to slash prices, and real estate values entered a downward spiral.

“To be competitive, to sell your house, you have to undersell the guy down the street and that’s what’s driving your market down,” said Randy Siske, a Realtor and president of the Haywood County Board of Realtors.

ALSO: What new property values mean for your taxes

But the property reval carried rather pleasant surprise in Haywood County when it came out last week.

“Overall we did not have a total collapse here as some other markets did. You don’t see things crippled here,” said David Francis, director of the county tax department

The total value of property — if you add up every home, business and piece of land — essentially remained flat. Roughly half the property owners in Haywood County saw their values go up, and half saw them drop, Francis said.

Keith Gibson, a private property appraiser in Haywood County, said pegging property values has been extremely difficult lately — the most difficult he’s experienced in his 25 years in the business.

Appraisals are dictated by the selling price of similar property. During the boom years, Gibson followed suit with the high prices in the market place, but he often found himself shaking his head over his own appraisals.

“We were seeing things that were unbelievable,” Gibson said. “We made predictions that this cannot go on like this.”

And indeed it didn’t. Property values fell with the recession, and fast, making it hard to know whether last month’s sale was a still an accurate yardstick for today’s appraisal.

“I have never seen values go down in Haywood County until the last two years,” Gibson said.

Fearing the real estate market was still in too much flux to accurately peg property values, Francis last year urged commissioners to postpone the reval until 2012. They had already postponed it one year, from 2010 to 2011.

“We collectively agreed to postpone it for a year because we were afraid there might not be enough valid sales to do as meaningful and accurate a revaluation as possible,” Commissioner Mark Swanger said.

Tax Assessor Judy Ballard didn’t have to dig deep to illustrate the problem. She randomly picked Triple Creek subdivision from a stack of property assessments. In the reval five years ago, appraisers had a long list of lot sales to base their estimates on — 25 of the 40 parcels in the subdivision had sold in the prior two years.

But this time, there were only four recent sales in Triple Creek, and they all fell below their former values.

Francis thought it wouldn’t hurt to delay the reval yet another year, as several neighboring counties have chosen to do. Jackson, Macon and Buncombe counties postponed theirs until 2013, and Swain until 2012.

But commissioners decided to take the plunge in Haywood this year.

Doing so keeps the reval from falling in an election year — although Swanger said this wasn’t the reason. Revals can be contentious and politically charged since tinkering with the tax rate will usually follow on its heels. But Swanger said the county had already entered a contract with an appraisal firm and delaying it could have cost the county fees.

 

Fewer appeals

In the past, angry property owners flooded the county tax office after seeing their new values, outraged by the sharp increase — and fearing the higher property taxes that would follow.

But last week, a county appraiser stationed at the tax window to field inquiries was sitting idle. A basket labeled “property appeals here” was empty, and a jar of fresh pens on the window ledge was untouched.

The county hasn’t seen nearly as many appeals this time, Francis said. For starters, “sticker shock” of rising real estate that played such a large role in past revals is obviously absent this time. But the values are likely more accurate than they’ve ever been this time, thanks to a new, highly engineered formula (see related article.)

“The county had a huge job to do and I think they did a pretty darn good job overall,” said Realtor Phil Ferguson, the owner/broker of The Seller’s Agency.

Ferguson said the county’s new values for his property were in the “ballpark,” and that is actually impressive.

“When they have 50,000 properties to go out and evaluate, there is no way to do it perfectly,” Ferguson said.

The county’s team appraises homes from the curb, stopping at each one but not going in. There’s a lot they might miss inside, said Gibson.

“The counter tops, the doorknobs, whether it has 10-foot ceilings, hardwood floors,” Gibson rattled off a few. Even whether a house has stained oak woodwork instead of painted baseboards and door jambs.

This year, the county is actually seeing appeals from people who think their new values are too low. While it seems odd to lobby for a higher appraisal — since higher values mean higher taxes — that’s exactly what some people are doing, Francis said.

He spoke to one property owner who saw a tract of land — land took the biggest hit in values — fall from $550,000 to $100,000.

“She was very concerned,” Francis said.

Francis has also fielded calls from homeowners who owe more on their mortgages than it is now worth. They want to know whether the bank will come knocking, asking the upside-down mortgage holders to pony up the difference. Francis assured them that’s not the case.

 

The winners and losers

While generalizations don’t apply to every house in every neighborhood, there are some trends.

•  Commercial went up, especially in downtown Waynesville (see chart).

• Tracts of land went down substantially. Land, once considered a mini-gold mine, is no longer in demand by developers. Plus, banks have balked at financing land.

• Lots in subdivisions went down, also due to old fashioned supply and demand. While there’s hundreds of lots for sale, the tanked economy halted the mountain migration of retiring baby boomers.

• Property closer to town held its value or went up compared to rural areas. On average, property values fell in Crabtree, Iron Duff, Jonathan Creek, Fines Creek and the like, while they went up in the towns of Waynesville and Canton and in areas closer to town.

• High-end homes went down, while lower priced homes went up. It’s no surprise, since expensive homes have been in less demand while affordable ones are highly sought.

“On a sliding scale, the higher you go the greater decrease you would find in price,” said Kirk Kirkpatrick, a county commissioner and attorney who has a bird’s eye view of the market through real estate closings.

Kirkpatrick’s own house in Laurel Ridge went from a value of $800,000 in 2006 to $650,000 in the recent reval.

But a small home he owns on the outskirts of Canton went up from $78,000 to $100,000 — a case in point that lower priced homes have gone up compared to expensive ones.

There’s a side effect come tax day, however. High-end property owners will no longer pick up as much of the county’s property tax tab as they once did. Median home owners will see their share of tax burden go up comparatively.

“That is an unfortunate outcome of what this economy has done,” Swanger said.

Of course, the county was lucky to lean on the higher-valued properties for the years that it did.

“I don’t think there is any question the real estate bubble artificially inflated the value of the upper-end homes. They are now back to where they should have been all along,” Swanger said.

 

Turn around coming

Realtor Randy Siske said it is important to take the long view. If you only look at how much your property went down since the last reval in 2006, you ignore the dramatic rise leading up to 2006. In the first half of the decade, property values rose by so much that even though they have taken a step back now, it’s more like one step back for two steps forward.

There has still be a net gain in value over the decade as a whole — although it’s hardly consolation to those who bought at the market’s peak.

Real estate watchers see an uptick on the horizon. After two years of decline, the number of homes sold last year leveled off (see graph).

“It has started to stir now. There have been several good closings in the last couple of months,” Gibson said.

Before prices can fully recover, however, the number of homes on the market needs to be thinned out.

“There is still a lot of inventory on the market. If people don’t absolutely have to sell right now they probably shouldn’t,” Ferguson said.

The converse is certainly true.

“Now is a great time to buy,” Ferguson said.

 

 

What went up, what went down

Median and lower-priced in-town homes held their value compared to tracts of land and mountainside subdivisions, which fell in value. Commercial went up nearly universally. Here’s a break down by geographic region of the county.

Town of Waynesville: +4.22%
Waynesville outskirts: -0.29%
Town of Canton: +1.85%
Beaverdam (Canton outskirts): +3.86%
Town of Maggie: -0.67%
Ivy Hill (Maggie outskirts): +2.76%
Town of Clyde: +6.75%
Clyde outskirts: -2.25%
Jonathan Creek: -0.43%
Crabtree: -3.92%
Iron Duff: -9.99%
Fines Creek: -11.95%
White Oak: -17.93%
Cataloochee: -14.39%
Lake Logan: +1.49%
East Fork: -3.17%

Commercial
Waynesville downtown commercial: +27.9%
Canton downtown commercial: +14.6%
Maggie Valley downtown commercial: +8.8%
Clyde downtown commercial: +3.8%

It’s what everyone wants to know: is their neighbor’s house worth more or less than their own?

It’s not hard to find out at the county’s mapping site, where there’s a plethora of property revaluation data to keep even the most obsessed followers of local real estate busy for days.

Here’s how to navigate the county’s online mapping and tax information.

 

How to view property information:

• Go to http://maps.haywoodnc.net/gisweb/default.htm. (Or, from Haywood County’s home page, click on “maps” on the left.

• Search for your parcel by name, or click on “PIN” to search using the PIN number from your property notice.

• Your property will be highlighted in blue. You can also see your total assessed value, acreage, and so forth.

• For more complete details of the property, such as number of bedrooms, heated square feet, etc., click on “view tax card” on the lower left.

• To see the value of your neighbors’ property, click on “adjoiners” on the lower left. A list of neighboring parcels will appear. As you scroll over the list, the parcel on the map will be highlighted. Click “details” for the parcel you want to see info for. Click “back to search results” to get back to the list.

• To see the details of any parcel, first click on the “identify” button across the top, then click on the parcel you want to see.

• To move around your neighborhood, click on the symbol of the hand across the top and then use the tool to drag the map around.

 

How to find recent real estate sales:

• To see what recent sales in your neighborhood were used as a baseline for your property revaluation, pull up your own parcel (using directions above.)

• Click on “select viewable layers” (in the black bar just above the map).

• In the list on the left hand side, check the boxes for “revaluation neighborhoods” and “valid sales.” (Don’t uncheck anything that is already checked.)

• Recent sales used to determine property values in your neighborhood will be outlined in red. You may have to zoom out to see them.

• To see the details of any of the parcels, first click on the “identify” button across the top, then click on the parcel you want to see.

 

How to find old property values:

• Only the latest property values from the revaluation show up with the parcels on the map site.

• To find the old values for a parcel, go to http://www.haywoodnc.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=960&Itemid=134 (Or, from Haywood County’s home page, click on “taxes online” on the left side.

• Type in the name of the property owner.

• If the property owner owns multiple parcels, they will all come up and you will then have to select the one you want.

• When you select a property from the list, last year’s tax card will come up, which shows the value of the property last year.

In a we-were-really-just-kidding-around reversal, Jackson County commissioners this week decided to delay their previous decision to delay property revaluation.

A draft resolution to push back the countywide appraisal from next year to 2016 was thoughtfully included by county staff in commissioners’ and media’s agenda packets, but was ignored as commissioners by collective consensus shied away.

Commissioner Mark Jones, a Democrat who lives in the Cashiers area, acknowledged he’d gotten plenty of emails and phone calls from constituents on the subject. The market value of high-priced lots and homes are destined to fall in a countywide revaluation. Delaying the reval means the county can continue taxing high-end properties on a book value that is no longer realistic. But going forward with it would shift property tax burden to median-priced properties.

Chairman Jack Debnam, a real-estate agent in real life, said his change of heart was from a conviction the county needed to see the results of revaluations under way in Haywood and Henderson counties before making such a decision.

Tax Assessor Bobby McMahan had recommended the delay. During a prior board meeting, McMahan cited the extreme downturn of the real-estate market and the difficulty of accurately determining market value.

The purpose of a revaluation is to determine fair market value for tax reasons.

With a clipboard under one arm and a giant measuring spool under the other, Greg West climbed into a county-marked truck last Wednesday, cranked the engine and consulted a large Waynesville map on the seat beside him.

“Today we’re hitting Blink Bonny,” he said, planting an index finger on street in a traditional middle class suburb.

West would spend the next eight hours slowly cruising Blink Bonny’s neighborhood streets, eyeing each house from the curb or even loitering in the driveway for telltale signs of its worth.

If anyone’s home, they might mistake him for a stalker. But in fact West is part of a team of Haywood County property appraisers tasked with assigning a new dollar value to each home, lot and tract of land — a dollar value which in turn will determine how much you pay in property taxes.

It’s been five years since the last countywide property assessment. In the past, you could count on values to go up with each reval, but it’s a different ballgame this time. The volatile real estate market has made it tougher for West and his compatriots to pin down accurate values.

With fewer homes selling, there’s less of a baseline to go by. And just because a home sold for one price six months ago doesn’t mean that’s still what it is worth today.

The county essentially wrote its own computer program to calculate property values, taking dozens of variables into account before spitting out a number. The finely-customized formula carves the county up into 700 neighborhoods of like homes. It was lot of work on the front end — entering not just the number of bedrooms, square footage and whether a home has a garage — but also the school district, proximity to town parks or mountain views.

West’s property drive-by is now a time of reckoning as the three-year process concludes. West and the rest of his team are laying a pair of human eyes on each house to make sure their computer-generated values are right.

The property appraisers are in the home stretch of that task, having visited nearly all the county’s 50,000 parcels from Crabtree to Cruso, from Balsam to Beaverdam, from Max Patch to Maggie.

 

The verdict so far?

“It’s been fairly accurate. We put quite a bit of work into it with neighborhood delineation. It gave us a pretty good start,” West said.

Testing the formula is not hard. They visit homes in the neighborhood that have actually sold and compare the actual selling price to the computer-generated value.

In Blink Bonny, West’s first test of their formula was a 3.5-acre tract. The computer pegged its market value at $77,800. It recently sold for $77,500, a mere $300 difference.

“Our formula fell right on the money,” said Ron McCarthy, a property appraisal consultant with RSN Appraisal assisting the county with the revaluation.

McCarthy downplayed any role luck played. They are just that good, he said.

“Luck is the residue of design,” McCarthy quoted.

But to make sure, West pointed his car a couple of streets over where a home had recently sold. The computer formula put the home at $315,000 but it sold in real life for $365,000. Suddenly things weren’t looking so rosy. West set out to uncover the discrepancy.  

He pored over the county’s data sheets for the home and found the culprit. It had been given a quality grade of average — a “C” on a scale from F to A+.

But this three-story house sported stacked stone, beadboard ceilings in a wrap-around porch, octagon attic windows and other classy features. Compared to the brick ranch homes on the rest of the street, a “C” rating was too low.

He changed the quality to a B+. Running the formula again but with the corrected data, it came up within a few thousand dollars of nailing the real selling price.

West was relieved. The formula itself wasn’t wrong — just the data that was plugged into it. With several dozen variables factored into the formula, if any of them are wrong, the value it spits out will likewise be wrong.

And that’s precisely West’s job during the drive-bys: to ensure the underlying data for each house is right.

Does the home have a new garage or deck? Has it fallen into disrepair? Is it junked up with a sofa on the front porch? Has the gravel driveway now been paved?

At one home, West did a double-take after spying a second-story over the garage with curtains and blinds visible inside the window.

“Looks like they added a bonus room,” West said, something his sketch of the home in the county’s records didn’t show.

West recalibrate the home’s square feet, triggering a higher value.

Three doors up, West’s keen eye struck again. A brick patio near the front door seemed in mint condition — no moss stains on the pavers, which you’d expect with a ‘70s era house. Either they had recently invested in a pressure washer or the patio was new.

West lifted his tape measure from the back seat and climbed out of the truck. He rung the bell and met a particularly helpful homeowner who not only confirmed that the front patio was new but volunteered that there was another new patio out back. Both would boost the home’s value.

“He had a keen eye to notice that,” McCarthy said of West’s detective work. “That’s why we do the drive-by.”

McCarthy put his own skills to work at the next house in a just-for-fun blind match-up against the computer formula. He sized up the house from the car window, glanced at the sketch of its footprint and threw out his best guess. He was just a few thousand dollars off from the computer-generated value of $300,000.

That likewise bodes well for the county’s modeling — the computer formula came up with the same value as a seasoned appraiser on the ground.

Yet there’s all sorts of factors that might lead appraisers to tweak your home value during the drive-bys. If the neighborhood is uniform — homes of same quality and condition — it’s an easy day.

“If it’s in-town homes on quarter-acre lots, you can just go bam, bam, bam, bam,” West said.

But there’s usually more variation than that.

New windows and a freshly shingled roof? This could earn you brownie points for your home’s condition, and a slight bump in value. Sagging gutters and mildewed sills could bring you down a notch.

“This is like the quality control,” McCarthy said of their work.

The labor intensive process can seem never ending, and indeed as soon as this reval is finished they county will soon start ramping up for the next one another four or five years away.

 

Attention Haywood County property owners

Start watching your mailbox in March for a notice from the county reflecting the new and current market value of your home.

In North Carolina, counties are required to reassess property values every few years. The revaluation — or “reval” — is intended to level the playing field, bringing the county’s assessed value of your property in line with the true market value so everyone is paying their fair share come tax day.

Don’t assume that your property taxes will go up or down just because your property values do, however. Haywood County commissioners won’t set the actual tax rate until June. The tax rate is then applied to your property value to determine your tax bill for 2011.

With a clipboard under one arm and a giant measuring spool under the other, Greg West climbed into a county-marked truck last Wednesday, cranked the engine and consulted a large Waynesville map on the seat beside him.

“Today we’re hitting Blink Bonny,” he said, planting an index finger on a traditional middle class suburb.

West would spend the next eight hours slowly cruising their neighborhood streets, eyeing each house from the driveway for tell-tale signs of its worth. If anyone’s inside, they might easily mistake him for a stalker loitering at the curb.

West is part of the team of Haywood County property appraisers tasked with assigning a new dollar value to each home, lot and tract of land — a dollar value which in turn will determine how much you pay in property taxes.

It’s been five years since the last countywide property assessment. In the past, you could count on values to go up, but it’s a different ballgame this time. The volatile real estate market has made it tougher for West and his compatriots to pin down accurate values.

With fewer homes selling, there’s less of a baseline to go by. And just because a home sold for one price six months ago doesn’t mean that’s still what it is worth today.

The county essentially wrote its own computer program to calculate property values, taking dozens of variables into account before spitting out a number. It was lot of work on the front end and involved carving the county up into 700 neighborhoods of like homes.

West’s property drive-by is now a time of reckoning as the three-year process concludes. West is laying a pair of human eyes on each house to make sure their computer-generated value is right.

The property appraisers are in the home stretch of that task, having visited nearly all the county’s 50,000 parcels from Crabtree to Cruso, from Balsam to Beaverdam, from Max Patch to Maggie.

The verdict so far?

“It’s been fairly accurate. We put quite a bit of work into it with neighborhood delineation. It gave us a pretty good start,” West said.

Testing the formula is not hard. The first order of business with each of his daily drive-bys is to visit any homes in the neighborhood that may have actually sold. He compares the computer-generated value with what it actually sold for.

In Blink Bonny, West’s first test of their formula was a 3.5-acre tract. The county had pegged its market value at $77,800. In the real world, it recently sold for $77,500. A mere $300 apart.

“Our formula fell right on the money,” said Ron McCarthy, a property appraisal consultant with RSN Appraisal assisting the county with the revaluation.

McCarthy protested any role luck played. They are just that good, he said.

To make sure, West pointed his car a couple of streets over where a home had recently sold. The computer formula put the home at $315,000 but it sold in real life for $365,000. Suddenly things weren’t looking so rosy. West set out to uncover the discrepancy.  

West pored over the county’s data for the home and found the culprit. It had been given a quality grade of average — a “C” on a scale from F to A+.

But this three-story house sported stacked stone, beadboard ceilings in a wrap-around porch, octagon attic windows and other posh features. Compared to the brick ranch homes on the rest of the street, a “C” rating was too low.

He changed the quality to a B+. Using the same formula, but with the corrected data, it was now within a few thousand dollars.

West was relieved. The formula itself wasn’t wrong — just the data that was plugged into it

With several dozen variables factored into the formula, if any of them are wrong, the value it spits out will likewise be wrong. Thus West’s job during the drive-bys is mostly to ensure the data for each house is right.

Does the home have a new garage or deck? Has it fallen into disrepair? Is it junked up with a sofa on the front porch? Has the gravel driveway now been paved?

At one home, West spotted the telltale sign of a finished bonus room over the family’s garage: curtains and blinds over an upstairs window. The homeowners had added finished square feet, and that updated data triggered a higher value.

Three doors up, West’s keen eye struck again. A brick patio at the side of the house looked remarkably clean and lacked any sign of chipping and cracking you would expect for a patio dating to the home’s construction. Either they had recently invested in a pressure washer or the patio was new.

West lifted the tape measure from the back seat and climbed out. He rung the bell, and a particularly helpful home owner revealed that not only was the front patio new but there was another new patio out back. Both would boost the home’s value.

“He had a keen eye to notice that,” McCarthy said. “That’s why we do the drive-by.”

In a blind match-up between McCarthy and the computer formula, he sized up a house from the car window, glanced at the sketch of its footprint and threw out his best guess. He was just a few thousand off from the computer on a $300,000 house.

That likewise bodes well for the county’s modeling — the computer formula came up with the same value as a seasoned appraiser on the ground.

Yet there’s all sorts of tweaking that might lead West to adjust your home value during the drive-bys. If the neighborhood is uniform — homes of same quality and condition — it’s an easy day.

“If it’s in town homes on quarter-acre lots, you can just go bam, bam, bam, bam,” West said.

But there’s usually more variation than that.

New windows and a freshly shingled roof? This could earn you brownie points for your home’s condition, and a slight bump in value. Sagging gutters and mildew-stained flashing could bring you down a notch.

Views are particularly tricky. When the majority of a neighborhood has mountain views, the view factor is already built in to the baseline of home values.

If you are the lone house without a view, you will see your value reflect that.

Of, if you are the lone house with a view in a  neighborhood that otherwise lacks them, plan on a requisite bump up.

 

Attention Haywood County property owners

Start watching your mailbox in March for a notice from the county with your new property value reflecting the current market value of your home.

In North Carolina, counties are required to reassess property values every few years. The revaluation — or “reval” — is intended to level the playing field, bringing the county’s assessed value of your property in line with the true market value so everyone is paying their fair share when paying property taxes.

Don’t assume that your taxes will go up or down just because your property values have, however. Haywood County commissioners won’t set the actual tax rate until June.

Property owners in Haywood County will soon learn how their home and land values weathered the recession.

Every home, lot and tract of land in the county — all 50,000 of them — have been reappraised to reflect the current real estate market.

Some will see their property value go up compared to the last countywide appraisal in 2006. But a good number will find their property values have gone down. Start watching your mailbox in March for a notice from the county with new property values.

While the county isn’t yet saying what folks should expect — whether property values as a whole went up or down — it’s not rocket science to make an educated prediction.

“I would think the normal market price is going to drop, on some properties as much as 30 percent,” according to Bruce McGovern, real estate broker and owner of McGovern Property Management and Real Estate Sales.

Of course, it will vary by the type of property. Higher priced homes are more likely to drop, while median priced homes have held their value better and may see increases.

What’s likely to take the biggest hit?

“Vacant subdivision lots have come way down,” McGovern said. So has land.

McGovern pointed to 40 acres he just sold for $160,000 — far less than the $400,000 it was initially listed for four years ago.

But it’s not necessarily a bad thing, McGovern said. WNC was a victim of an inflated real estate market five years ago. Now, values are more realistic.

“I think it is a true adjustment that needed to be done,” McGovern said. “We need to have correct appraisals on property.”

 

Final countdown

A team of four county appraisers is still wrapping up the two-year process with a final drive-by of every piece of property. Snow in December and January set this final step back a few weeks, said David Francis, director of the county tax department. Francis said his staff has been working long hours, including Saturdays, to get it wrapped up.

“It is a complicated process,” Francis said. “It is something we take extremely seriously. We want to make this as accurate and as fair as possible.”

In North Carolina, counties are required to conduct a periodic mass appraisal of real estate — called a revaluation, or “reval” for short. Property taxes are based on property values — the more your property is worth the more taxes you pay. The reval is intended to level the playing field, bringing the county’s assessed value of your property in line with the true market value so everyone is paying their fair share come tax day.

Haywood County commissioners will set the property tax rate in June, which is related to but not contingent on the results of the reval.

This reval will be a different story compared to the last reval in 2006 at the height of the mountain land rush when property owners saw their values double, triple or even quadruple.

The county actually postponed its revaluation from 2010 to 2011 because the real estate market was still in flux, making it difficult for appraisers to determine new market values for property accurately.

Haywood County is one of the first mountain counties to wade into a reval since the real estate crash.

Swain County did a reval two years ago but tossed it out rather than enact it. Swain is now shooting for 2012 instead. Macon County was on schedule to do a reval this year, but postponed it until 2013.

Jackson County is still in limbo about whether and by how much to postpone its reval.