Mecklenburg County property owners will have to wait a few more months to find out their new property tax values, the county’s top tax official said Monday.
Assessor Ken Joyner said that notices won’t be sent out to the owners of more than 400,000 properties in Mecklenburg in January, as planned.
One big reason: Wild swings in the real estate market, as the years-long boom in home prices, runs into rising interest rates.
“As the market has changed, we now anticipate to mail the notices a little bit later, probably sometime in early- to mid-March, so that we've got ample time to review all those sales through the end of the year,” said Joyner, speaking to the Cornelius Town Board.
Property owners are likely to see some eye-popping numbers when they open their revaluation notices. It’s the county’s first property revaluation since 2019, and home prices have increased sharply since then. Joyner said that, so far, the county is seeing an average property value of $450,000.
Residential property values have increased an average of 57%, while commercial property values are up an average of 39%.
Property owners will have the opportunity to appeal their new tax value after the notices go out, Joyner said.
Mecklenburg, the city of Charlotte and the six towns in the county will use the new values as the basis for setting property tax rates. Higher property values don’t automatically mean a higher tax bill: Local governments can choose to set a “revenue neutral” tax rate instead of increasing taxes, and whether an individual property owner’s bill goes up depends in part on whether their property value increases more than average.
