In preparation for the county’s next property tax revaluation, Alamance County’s tax office is preparing to roll out the document that will effectively serve as the pricing guide for this countywide reassessment.
Officially dubbed the “schedules of values, standards, and rules,” this massive tome will be unveiled before Alamance County’s commissioners when they convene their next regularly-scheduled meeting at 9:30 a.m. this coming Tuesday.
A state-mandated component of any countywide revaluation, the schedule of values is, in essence, the workbook that tax assessors use to appraise different kinds of real property. According to the county’s tax office, the ultimate purpose of this manual is to ensure that property appraisals are conducted as uniformly as possible.
“It sets the rates, tables, and procedures for valuing land, homes, farms, and businesses,” the tax office explains in a report that will be shared with the commissioners on Tuesday, “so [that] two similar properties are valued consistently, whoever appraises them.”
In the case of Alamance County, this proposed schedule will be used by contractors from the firm Vincent Valuations, which the board of commissioners has hired to conduct the countywide revaluation that’s slated to take effect in January of 2027. This forthcoming reval will be the first one completed on the new four-year cycle that the county has transitioned toward since the commissioners decided to depart from their traditional eight-year revaluation calendar more than a decade ago.
According to the county’s tax office, the proposed schedule of values contains tables of land values and neighborhoods, schedules to gauge building costs and depreciation, “present-use” values for agricultural acreage, and rules for appraising special kinds of property such as income-bearing and commercial real estate.
In addition to serving as a guide for the tax appraisers themselves, the schedule of values is also a public record and is intended to inject a measure of transparency into the revaluation process.
To this end, the county is required to hold a public hearing on the proposed schedule, which is tentatively slated to take place on October 19. Following this hearing, the board of commissioners will be free to adopt the schedule pending a five-week period during which residents will be able to challenge its contents.
According to the tax office, anyone interested in poring over the schedule can visit the tax office at 124 West Elm Street in Graham to review it in person. A digital copy of the document will also be available online at https://tax.alamancecountync.gov. In addition, residents can call 336-228-1312 to make inquiries by phone or send questions by email to tax.help@alamancecountync.gov.
