Correction appended
It’s not a big house, and there’s nothing remarkable about it on paper. Built in 1965, it has three bedrooms and a total finished square footage of 2,112. Along with its detached garage and a couple of outbuildings, it sits on just 1.1 acres of land—a tiny parcel within the grand foothills of the White Hall area, where it’s located. But this very average rural property, at 2942 Browns Gap Turnpike, has more than doubled in value in the last 11 years. Assessed at $103,400 in 1996, it hit the assessor’s books in 2007 at $221,400—a 114 percent increase.
No area of the county rose in value faster than White Hall, where properties saw an average jump of 16.7 percent this year. But the county as a whole is certainly in the midst of a boom in property values that’s picked up considerable steam in the last half-decade. A closer look at the house on Browns Gap gets to the heart of the story: It’s the land, stupid.
 Skyrocketing land values mostly account for Albemarle’s rising assessments. Numbers represent average annual growth rate. |
Back in 1996, the house itself was assessed at $76,400. That value climbed steadily through the late ’90s and into the new millennium, seeing big jumps in 2005 (41 percent) and 2007 (37 percent). It’s now valued at $95,400. That’s an impressive climb, but the land it sits on—that 1.1-acre postage stamp—has positively skyrocketed, to $126,000 in 2007 from $76,000 in 2005. That’s a 66 percent increase in two years.
Lest Albemarle residents moan too loudly about the jump in property taxes that will inevitably result from such hefty assessments, the County is careful to point out that compared to other places nearby, its assessments are actually growing slowly. Greene County, for example, saw a 24 percent annual jump, slightly edged out by Orange County at 25 percent.
Now that’s what we call a rising tide.
For more information, go to:
www.charlottesville-area-real-eastate.com
Correction February 12, 2007
Due to a reporting error, a January 30 story on County assessments ["County assessments keep soaring"] failed to put assessment increases in their temporal context: Assessment on a house in White Hall increased at a biennial rate of 41 percent in 2005, not an annual rate as implied. The same house increased at a biennial rate of 10 percent in this year’s assessment, not 37 percent as reported. And, to clarify, the large jump in 2005 followed a sharp decline in the 2003 assessment of the property, a fact that should have been included to give complete context to the large jump in assessment.
