Pitt County tax base grew an estimated $5.8 billion in last four years

Initial data shows Pitt County’s tax base grew by an estimated $5.8 billion in the last four years, increasing to $22.5 billion, the county tax administrator said.

Pitt County residents who own real property, land and buildings, will receive new notices of value beginning Monday as part of the four-year reappraisal process. Tax Administrator Russell Hill said the amount of tax base could fluctuate slightly once informal reviews and formal appeals begin and the new individual personal and business personal property values are added.

Reappraisals are conducted by North Carolina county governments to ensure a property’s tax value is the same as its market value, Hill said. The state requires reappraisals every eight years but allows communities to do them soon. Pitt County conducts reappraisals every four years, Hill said.

Greene County property was last assessed in 2021. The county conducts is revaluation every eight years.

Real estate — homes, industrial and commercial structures and property — make up $18.2 billion of the county’s tax base, that is about 50 percent more than the 2020 real estate value of $12 billion, Hill said.

The tax base growth isn’t surprising when you look at Pitt County home sale prices in the last four years and the growth in new development, Hill said.

Since 2020, when the county’s last appraisal was done, the median home sale price has increased by nearly 57.6 percent, Hill said.

The county also saw about 5,000 new properties developed, increasing the number of parcels from 74,600 in 2020 to more than 79,600 as of Jan. 1.

“When you look at it, that’s not quite 10 percent growth of parcel counts. It’s just once again confirmation that people see the value and they are moving into Pitt County,” Hill said.

The growth isn’t limited to one area, Hill said.

“Everything increases across the board. Maybe not the same percentage across the board, but all the towns, all the municipalities had some type of increase there,” Hill said.

One of the major drivers of the increase was new home construction and sale prices in recent years.

“What we saw is if you had a particular type of house with (the same) square footage, it sold similarly regardless of whether it was in Greenville, Winterville, Farmville or anywhere else,” Hill said.

As part of the reappraisal process, the tax office reviewed the sale of 2,239 residential properties that occurred in 2023.

The largest number of sales, 767, were homes priced between $350,000 to $349,000.

The second largest group, 643, sold for $150,000 to $249,000. The remaining sales were properties either below $149,999 or over $350,000.

Not every property value increased, Hill said, with about 11 percent of the county’s properties decreasing in value. The decrease was usually because a structure suffered damage and had not been repaired, or something was removed from the property.

While people are mostly pleased to learn their homes have a higher value, the reappraisal process is often accompanied by fears of higher property taxes.

“We don’t know what the (tax) bill will be until the tax rate is set during the budgeting process,” Hill said. “What we are trying to do in this process is to get the values correct, 100 percent of market value, so when your local board members are deciding, they know how much value they have to decide the actual rates they need.”

State law requires local governments to publish their revenue-neutral tax rate — how much the tax rate has to decrease or increase to generate the same amount of property tax revenue as the current fiscal year tax rate — as part of the budgeting process.

Pitt County government, and most of its municipalities, begin public budget discussions in April, May and June. State law requires new budgets be adopted by June 30, in time for the new fiscal year which begins July 1.

Hill’s office sent Pitt County’s 10 municipalities estimates earlier this week.

Once the notice of values go out, property owners can seek an informal review if they believe their values are inaccurate. Formal appeals before the county Board of Equalization and Review begin April 12 through May 2.

Property owners have to prevent evidence showing their property was assessed inconsistently with similar types of property or that the tax value is substantially more or less than the true market value.

People can research their property values by researching the sale prices of comparable properties. The information can be found using the Pitt County Online Parcel Information System, www.gis.pittcountync.gov/opis, searching for their property under the owner’s name or the property address, then clicking on “property record card” and then clicking on the “Comper” tab, map-based tool that generates reports on comparable properties.