The contractor tasked with Alamance County’s next property revaluation has noticed that commercial properties across the county have been fetching much higher sale prices than their current tax values would indicate.
Ryan Vincent of Vincent Valuations revealed this disconnect between commercial sale prices and assessed tax values when he appeared before the county’s board of commissioners on Monday to whisk back the curtain on the forthcoming reval.
During his presentation to the commissioners, Vincent presented four recent transactions where commercial properties sold for up to 206 percent more than their current tax values, which date back to the county’s last revaluation in 2023. He compared these increases with an illustrative sample of residential sales, where the homes in question sold for just 1 to 34 more than their tax values.
“Generally, we’re seeing those [commercial properties] go up substantially higher than the residential [sales],” he went on to concede. “But we still have just under a year of sales to come in, and we don’t know what the market is going to do.”
The four commercial transactions that Vincent highlighted for the commissioners include the sale of Hobby Lobby in the Alamance Crossing shopping center, which changed hands in January for $6.9 million. Vincent noted that this sum amounts to a 118 percent markup from the property’s tax value, which was assessed for $3,165,942 in 2023.
Vincent observed a similar pattern with the former premises of The Mebane Enterprise, which were sold in December for $350,000 – or 116 percent more than the $162,056 that appears on the tax rolls. He added that, this past June, the Crescent Square shopping center in Graham went for $6.7 million, or 59 percent more than its tax value of $4,212,194; while on January 22, a renovated building along South Church Street in Burlington garnered a sale price of $730,000 – a 206 percent hike over the assessed value of $238,648.
Vincent compared these commercial sale prices with the results of some recent residential transactions, which showed much more modest increases of 1 to 34 percent over the property’s assessed tax values.
The relatively wide gulf between sale price and tax value for the Vincent’s commercial case studies may seem to vindicate an off-heard complaint about the county’s reval in 2023, which has received a fair amount of criticism for its allegedly lowball assessments of big box shopping centers.
In the meantime, Steve Carter, the vice chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, argued that the comparatively high rates for commercial transactions are likely to bode well for Alamance County’s homeowners when the results of the next mass reassessment take effect in the opening months of 2027.
“We’re seeing a really big bump in our commercial values which could interpolate to a decrease for our homeowners,” Carter said in response to Vincent’s report. “That’s making me feel better about what we might see in 2027 from the perspective of our tax base.”
According to Alamance County’s tax administrator Brad Fowler, the work which Vincent is currently doing will eventually recalibrate all of the county’s tax values based on the market conditions that exist in January of 2027. Fowler stressed that this state-mandated exercise is meant to reflect the real estate market and not to dictate the sale prices of property.
“The objective is to redistribute the tax base and bring all values to the current market,” he added. “The tax department does not create market values; we’re simply tracking what the sales tell us.”
The revaluation which takes place next year will be the first time that this countywide reappraisal occurs on a 4-year-cycle, which the commissioners have previously agreed to follow in lieu of the county’s traditional eight-year schedule. In order to attain this truncated cycle, the commissioners have farmed out the entire reval to Vincent Valuations, which had assisted the tax office with commercial appraisals in 2023.
As part of its $2.6 million contract, the company has also been asked to complete a “full list and measure” of the county’s taxable property. Vincent told the commissioners that his firm is just a few months from wrapping up this heightened form of data collection, which hadn’t occurred on a countywide level in over three decades. He added, however, that gathering this information is merely the first step in conducting the actual revaluation.
“From there we start analyzing the data,” he said, “and we build our models which are called the schedule of values…The schedule of values remains in play until the next reappraisal…Then, we’re going parcel by parcel in our office and neighborhood by neighborhood to make sure the values are accurate.”
Vincent said that these newly-refined values will be sent out to property owners in the opening months of 2027. The owners will then have an opportunity to appeal these values before the commissioners establish a new tax rate that takes into account any increase in the overall tax base.
Although Vincent Valuations is handling most of this work on the behalf of the tax office, Fowler has previously informed the commissioners that he expects future revals to occur partly inhouse. The last time the county has conducted a fully inhouse revaluation was in 2017, when the local real estate market had more or less recovered from a crash that bedeviled the previous mass reassessment in 2009.
