Market-Based Reassessment Means Higher Taxes for Residents, Big Cuts for Big Businesses

Transylvania County’s recent property reappraisal was conducted by the books, but in Brevard is leading to “unfair” tax burden on low-income residents, officials said.

A two-bedroom home in Brevard’s Rosenwald neighborhood assessed for tax purposes at $108,000 last year, $242,000 this year.

BREVARD — Ella Jones’ tiny, 77-year-old house on North Lane has seen a lot of hard use and not enough maintenance in the last few years, she said.

“It’s just gone down,” she said of the condition of the 830-square-foot home that she previously rented and that is now occupied free of charge by her son and his family.

“I couldn’t make house payments on it, pay taxes on it and keep it up,” she said. “It just was not happening.”

That’s why she was surprised to see its taxable value climb 83 percent — from $84,000 to $154,000 — after this year’s re-evaluation of Transylvania County properties.

It’s why, when she answered her cell phone Tuesday afternoon, she was walking into the county Tax Administration office to appeal its assessment.

“It’s a little bit much,” said Jones, 74, who has lived in Brevard since she was a child.

Or a lot much, according to Brevard city officials, residents and even Chris Owen, the county’s reappraisal manager, who said at the May 5 Brevard City Council meeting that he and his staff were “shocked” when they started compiling the results of their reassessments.

The total value of property in the county soared an “unprecedented” 56 percent compared to the 2021 assessment, he said, and about 49 percent in the city of Brevard.

It’s one more symptom of a much-discussed trend in Transylvania, the skyrocketing prices of residential properties. These make up the vast majority of the county’s improved parcels, Owen told Council, and the median price of a single-family home in the county climbed from $330,000 in 2020 — the final year of the previous evaluation period — to nearly $500,000 last year.

The assessment process is guided by state law and vetted for compliance by the North Carolina Department of Revenue, he said, which also requires counties to submit data showing how closely actual sales matched assessed values — almost precisely in Transylvania, it turned out.

The area that saw the biggest jump in appraised value of improved properties — a whopping 153 percent — is also the one containing the county’s priciest homes, the Lake Toxaway Fire District.

But according to county records and a range of speakers at recent Council meetings, it also appears that, at least in Brevard, the new valuations disproportionately impacted modest homes, especially those such as Jones’, in the historically African-American Rosenwald neighborhood.

And there’s a much starker difference in the assessments of these houses and the commercial properties of large corporations — Lowe’s Companies Inc., Ingles Markets and HCA, which owns Transylvania Regional Hospital — the values of which either rose slightly or declined.

Because the city is on track to drop its property tax rate by more than 12 cents to help counter the generally higher assessments, these companies will see significant cuts to their city tax bills at a time when many homeowners face hefty increases.

Council Council member Aaron Baker decried this trend and singled out Ingles, saying it was being rewarded for its well-documented practice of holding on to vacant buildings, which not only locks out competitors but, as the condition of these empty properties declines, results in lower assessments and tax bills.

He doesn’t doubt that the county followed the existing appraisal system, but it’s a system, he said, that has left “the whole tax burden shifting in a big way toward lower-end residential properties.”

A Meticulous Process

In his presentation and in emailed answers to questions from NewsBeat, Owen described the painstaking reevaluation process, which his four-person team completes every four years — or twice as frequently as state law requires.

County appraisers periodically visit all the developed properties in the county, he said, assessing exterior conditions and, when possible, interviewing owners about interiors.

The state-mandated process for the subsequent valuation of these holdings is laid out in the county’s 214-page Schedule of Values.

It includes long lists of construction materials, rates them by desirability, and details how they should be graded in the appraisals.

Assessors must consider the condition of the buildings, the document says, and, in the case of commercial and rental properties, they also try to factor in income-generating potential. They determine each parcel’s value based on these qualities and the price of nearby comparable properties that recently changed hands.

After the reassessment is completed, the Department of Revenue requires counties to submit the resulting “sales assessment ratio,” which compares recent sales prices to new valuations.

One hundred percent is a perfect score, Owen wrote in an email. Transylvania’s overall mark was just shy of 99 percent and Rosenwald’s was 97 percent, he wrote, “which means we are not over-assessing those properties.”

That’s not to say the valuations are perfect, he told Council, which is why the county allows appeals.

More than 2,000 such challenges have been submitted since the assessments were sent out at the start of the year and about two-thirds of them have resulted in value adjustments, he said.

Though property owners can appeal their valuations informally by visiting Tax Administration offices, he said, the window for that process, which opens every year in January, closed in April. Property owners can, however, submit a formal appeal to the county Board of Equalization and Review if they are postmarked before Wednesday. And Hannah Bowers, of the Transylvania NAACP, will be available at the Bethel A Baptist Church in Rosenwald this evening (May 23) between 5 and 7 p.m. to help expedite residents’ last-minute challenges.

It’s a process Owen encouraged at the meeting. “If you see issues or mistakes,” he said, “bring those to our attention so we can fix them.”

Market-Based Values, “Crazy” Disparities

Vacant former home of Kmart, part of an Ingles-owned property that saw only a slight increase in assessed value

Commercial and industrial buildings make up only about three percent of the total properties in the county, Owen said, and those commercial properties did see a significant overall increase in assessed value, about 50 percent.

That’s roughly half the average 97.6 percent assessment increase for single family homes in the county, while the value of vacant property grew at a relatively sluggish 19 percent.

NewsBeat’s look at the values of several dozen residential properties listed on the county’s GIS mapping website shows a broad range of these bumps in value, though almost all were greater than 50 percent and some were higher than 100 percent.

A similar look at individual commercial properties in the city, on the other hand, reveals several assessments that are, by comparison, shockingly low.

The value of HCA-owned Transylvania Regional Hospital dropped from $24 to $21.9 million and Lowe’s in Pisgah Forest from $8.1 to $7.6 million.

One property owned by Ingles — the vacant former Bi-Lo store and the adjacent strip of active commercial enterprises — saw a valuation dip from $6.7 to $6.6 million, while the parcel on North Broad Street containing Ingles and the vacant former location of Kmart climbed about 20 percent, from $10.3 to $12.3 million.

Owen’s response? Those values are based on the most recent comparable sales, he said, pointing to the $8.7 million 2021 sale of the plaza that includes the Food Lion supermarket and surrounding retail establishments.

And though he acknowledged that big corporations typically fight their assessments aggressively, he also recounted several instances of county assessors successfully pushing back on these appeals. And he said that neither Ingles, Lowe’s or HCA (none of which responded to calls for comment from NewsBeat) have challenged the current valuations.

“Math is math and statistics are statistics,” Owen said, “and all we do is reflect the market.”

Sounds right to Jeremy Owen, a prominent Realtor in Brevard (and no relation to Chris).

Covid-19 created a long-term slump in demand for office space, he said, and Tropical Storm Helene dampened buyer enthusiasm across the region.

Climbing interest rates, meanwhile, have increased both the financing costs of real estate investments and the income available from safe, conventional products.

“If you can get 6 percent or 5 percent in a money market, a 6 percent return on a building doesn’t seem too appealing,” he said.

As proof of sagging investor demand, he pointed to slow-to-move properties in the Heart of Brevard downtown retail district — which featured the lowest average valuation increases of any area that Chris Owen highlighted — including a large building on East Main Street listed for $2.9 million and the long-vacant former home of the Transylvania Times on North Broad.

But there’s even clearer proof that most homeowners will pay more in city taxes while rich corporations will pay far less, Baker said.

Local governments typically respond to increased valuations by reducing the tax rate.

The county has not discussed a recommended budget, but for Brevard, City Manager Wilson Hooper said at the May 5 meeting, maintaining the current level of property tax income would require reducing the levy of 48 cents per every $100 of assessed property value to a “revenue neutral” rate of slightly less than 33 cents.

Council members have tentatively agreed to back Hooper’s recommendation for a rate of 35.75 cents, effectively an increase of 8.3 percent.

The manager displayed a chart showing what both that rate and the new assessments would mean for owners of homes on the low, medium and high end of value range in the city.

The lowest-valued house he highlighted saw the highest percentage jump in its appraisal, from $99,000 to $192,000. Assuming a property tax rate of 35.75 cents, the owner’s annual bill (not including other city fees) would climb from $475 to $686, a 44 percent increase.

The lower tax rate, along with slight decreases or increases to the valuations of properties owned by Ingles, Lowe’s and HCA — companies that all generate billions in annual revenue — mean they will see tax cuts greater than or near 25 percent.

“It’s crazy,” Baker said.

The Downside of Gentrification

The difference in value increases between low-end and high-end homes in Brevard were all based on relatively small samples.

But if the disparities they showed were less dramatic than the ones between houses in general and those large commercial properties mentioned above, the results were consistent.

Wilson’s presentation, which included a million-dollar home with a valuation increase low enough for the owners to see a reduced tax bill, was based on a look at about 10 properties in each price range, he said.

A study Bowers conducted showed the average valuation of 20 one-owner properties in the mostly white neighborhood around East French Broad Street climbed 169 percent between 2014 and 2025 compared to 210 percent for 20 similar homes in Rosenwald.

NewBeat examined the tax records of a total of 20 single family homes — ten in Rosenwald with an average 2024 assessment of $99,300 and ten in the Straus Park subdivision with an average previous valuation of $830,000.

The assessments in Rosenwald grew by an average of 79 percent compared to 65 percent in Straus Park.

Baker said the evidence of the growing burden on working and fixed-income residents is clear enough to warrant further analysis, possibly a study like the one conducted in Buncombe County by Asheville-based Urban3, which sought to address “emerging national evidence . . . (of) long-standing racial inequities in the property tax system.”

The shorter term inequities in Rosenwald are the result of the neighborhood’s rapid and obvious gentrification.

Homes owned by Black residents for decades stand next to new, much more expensive dwellings purchased or rented by newcomers.

The big-money sales of these new properties create comparisons that necessarily drive up the assessments of all nearby dwellings.

“It feels that residents of Rosenwald are being punished by this gentrification,” Pamela Holder, a Council member and the pastor of Bethel A, said at the May 5 meeting, “and it feels so unfair.”

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com