Wake County has almost completed the 2020 reappraisal of all residential and commercial property and will send notices to all property owners on Jan. 14 about the new value of their property.
There is good news for the Town of Wake Forest where officials have long hoped for a better balance between residential and commercial property, somewhere close to 75 residential and 25 commercial. At the last reappraisal in 2016, the town was 77 percent residential and 23 percent commercial; in 2020 those numbers are 76 and 24 with a tax base of $5.8 billion.
Countywide, commercial real estate makes up 32 percent of the tax base, which is $162.2 billion.
Marcus Kinrade, the county’s tax director, briefly described the revaluation process for the Wake Forest Town Board Tuesday evening, saying the process “reestablishes the fairness of the tax burden” by updating real property values to reflect the market prices for Jan. 1, 2020. The state requires reappraisals in all counties every eight years, but in 2016 fast-growing Wake County changed to a four-year cycle to better reflect property values.
The county had used contract appraisers when the cycle was eight years. With the new cycle, Kinrade said all the work is being done inhouse with an additional 11 appraisers on the staff of 76.
Property owners will naturally want to know how much they will have to pay in property taxes, county and town. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on any changes in the value of the individual property and how the county and town, Wake Forest, decide to set their tax rates.
Kinrade said the Wake County tax rate now is 75 cents per $100 valuation. He said a neutral tax rate to bring in the same amount of revenue would be 60 cents, which also would factor in annual growth.
Wake Forest and Wake County do not have to adopt a neutral tax rate, but they do have to announce what that would be.
In 2016, in his first Wake Forest budget, Town Manager Kip Padgett proposed to keep
the property tax rate at the current 52 cents per $100 value with 41 cents to be used for general government operation and 11 cents for the Wake Forest Fire Department.
As Commissioner Brian Pate said after Padgett’s presentation, this will be a tax decrease for a lot of folks.
The reason? Wake County has just revalued all county property which resulted in the town’s tax base increasing from $4.51 million to $4.623 million. Padgett found that the tax rate to provide funds equivalent to those in the 2015-2016 fiscal year adjusted for growth – the revenue neutral rate – is 53.1 cents. He chose to go with the current rate of 52 cents instead even though it meant $400,000 less in the town budget.
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