By Taylor Boyd
According to the 2020 general reassessment, property values in Patrick County are within normal boundaries for the county.
Janet Rorrer, commissioner of revenue, said the county conducts a reassessment every six years “to revalue the land.”
In a reassessment report to the Patrick County Board of Supervisors, William Cole, appraiser for Brightminds LLC, said properties show a general trend of slightly increasing in value from 2015 to 2021.
Rorrer said Cole used Class Codes in the reassessment to categorize properties based on their physical characteristics.
His estimates show that Class Two, single family residential suburban homes, will experience a 4.66 percent increase. Class Five, undeveloped agricultural lands of 10 to 100 acres, and Class Six, undeveloped agricultural lands over 100 acres, are expected to increase 4.12 percent and 2.52 percent, respectively.
Values of Class 71-79 properties — tax-exempt properties like churches, cemeteries, rescue squads, or fire departments, according to Rorrer — are projected to increase 1.51 percent.
Cole predicted Class One, single family residential homes in town, will decrease 5.19 percent from 2015 to 2021. Apartments for multi-family dwellings, or Class Three properties, are expected to decrease by six percent, and Class Four, commercial buildings, are expected to drop by 3.8 percent.
“Part of the problem with some of these is there are so few sales. With those over 100 acres, there’s a limited amount of sales that we have that sells over 100 acres. When you look at” the projections “you got to keep in mind that you don’t always have a lot of sales for that class code section,” Rorrer said.
According to a 2018 ratio study summary, the average price of Class Code One property was $60,683.33 and $84,032.98 for Class Two.
“For Class Code Two, that could be anywhere from zero to 20 acres. That’s not broken down as to what is within the sales,” Rorrer said.
The sale average of Class Three properties was $730,000 and Class Four properties were $267,750. For Class Five, the average sale price was $21,624.10, and $373,469.33 for Class Six.
Using sales data of 120 samples from 2018 to 2020, Cole projected a median assessed value of $31,400 for raw land in the county, with an average sale price of $28,500 for 2021.
Rorrer said Cole did not “say in that scenario the amount” of raw land sold within the samples. “He’s just looking at an average of sale prices.”
Cole projected the average assessed value of improved properties would be $125,000 in 2021, with a median sale price of $131,950 by using a sample size of 218 from 2018 to 2020.
Rorrer said “improved means anything that sits on the property. It could be a property with a great, big barn on it, or it could be a store building. It could be any kind of structure on that property, and with what he’s done, I don’t know if that was what he meant as it being a house or not.”
According to Cole, the expected median assessed value of properties overall for 2021 is $92,500, and the average sale price would be $89,750.
This is the average of all sales, Rorrer said, and noted that Cole did not specify “how many acres he means, or the amount of buildings on the property.”
Cole said more than 2,500 residents commute from the county to neighboring localities to work, with the majority going to Henry County, Martinsville, Surry, and Roanoke. Fewer than 1,600 workers commute to Patrick County to work, with the majority of those who do commuting from Henry, Carroll, and Floyd counties.
