Property tax bills land with a big thud

Wake owners are first to get theirs, based on revaluations

RALEIGH -- The bite of property taxes is so sharp and deep this year that even a doctor's wife feels the pain.

Christina Manring, a stay-at-home mother raising her family on the same Raleigh land her physician husband's parents bought decades ago, got hit this week with a Wake County property tax bill totaling $11,514, up from $7,200 last year.

"We're cutting corners across the board," Manring said. "My husband's working extra, we're not doing summer camps, and had we known, we wouldn't be taking a trip we had already planned."

Manring is one of 311,000 Wake County property owners getting tax bills that were mailed Monday. They can't say they weren't warned. Revaluation notices in Wake and Durham counties went out last winter, alerting owners to their probable taxes. But the cold type of an actual bill still stunned some who had been lulled by politicians' promises to keep tax rates revenue neutral.

"They just don't understand how reval is going to affect them until the rubber meets the road," said Marcus Kinrade, an appraisals and collection manager with the Wake County tax office. He said calls to his office nearly tripled this week.

Wake's bills were the first to be based on the county's 2008 revaluation, which led to significant tax increases for those property owners who saw a hefty boost in the taxable values of homes and businesses -- an average 43 percent increase overall.

And the bottom-line pain Manring and other Wake County residents are feeling will soon be shared by property owners in Durham County, where tax bills are scheduled to go out Wednesday. Like Wake, Durham conducted a revaluation, but Durham's resulted in a more modest 30 percent average increase in the taxable value of homes and commercial property. Chatham, Orange and Johnston counties will mail out tax bills in August.

Durham residents are bracing for the hit -- even Bob and Marge Blackwell, who pay only half the tax rate because of a homestead exemption for senior citizens. Still, their home on Stephens Lane appreciated 36 percent, from $126,995 to $172,263. Their expected tax bill rose from $922 to $1,075 -- a 17 percent increase.

"You get angry at times," Marge Blackwell said. "You live to be 84 years old and you still have these problems pop up that you really never thought about."

With a tightening job market and high gasoline and food prices, Wake and Durham's higher tax bills come at a bad time. And a sour real estate market has depressed home prices, leaving many homeowners doubting that they could sell their houses for what the tax man says the houses are worth.

Wake's revaluation of Raleigh homeowner Helen Rodman's home pegged its value at $1 million, just a month after a market reappraisal placed its value at $800,000. But a soft real estate market meant she only got $775,000 when she sold her home this month -- about three-quarters of what the county had thought it was worth.

Posh Raleigh neighborhoods such as Boylan Heights and Five Points saw property values increase as much as a 150 percent, while residential and commercial property in Cary saw about a 39 percent increase in value.

Three years ago, Erik and Christina Manring built a new home in Raleigh on property once owned by his parents. At the time, their home was assessed at $650,000, a figure she considered fair.

But the county's 2008 revaluation pegged their property's value at nearly $1.3 million, a doubling she considers outrageous. Especially infuriating, Manring said, was that county appraisers agreed to knock just $34,000 off her property's seven-figure value when the couple appealed their revaluation.

"This was where my husband grew up, but had we known we would have changed the size of our house, maybe we might have even looked somewhere else," she said.

Since bills were mailed Monday, close to 1,400 people called with questions about their tax bills Wednesday, up from 450 from the week before, said Kinrade, the appraisals and collection manager with the Wake County tax office.

Callers are confused, Kinrade said. With Wake County property values increasing modestly in some areas and dramatically in others, the tax burden is heavier for property owners with revaluations that have climbed by more than 35 percent.

Several streets over from Rodman, Michael Rulison, who paid $17,000 for his home in 1968, said the high property values will accelerate the tearing down of homes inside the Beltline. Boosted values and higher tax bills make it harder for longtime residents to stay put. Rulison, a retiree whose ranch-style home is now valued at $346,574, says he won't move.

"This is going to gentrify the neighborhood and soon it will be filled with McMansions," Rulison said.