In January, the county’s tax administration office completed its two-year reappraisal process, which reassessed the property values for all of the roughly 126,000 parcels within Durham County. Notices for the new valuations started going out to residents at the start of March.
The assessed value of the property and the county tax rate determine a property owner’s annual tax bill. The last property valuation in Durham County was in 2019, when the median sale price for a house was approximately $239,500. By the end of last year, that figure had grown to $416,000.
North Carolina state statute requires all counties to conduct a reappraisal at least once every eight years, but because of the rapidly shifting housing market in the Triangle and neighboring counties, Durham County moved to a four-year appraisal schedule, which would allow residents to adapt to a more gradual change in property value, and accompanying tax bill.
Keyar Doyle, the county’s tax administrator, is a Durham native who started working in real estate in 2005. He says the new valuations come as a surprise to everyone, including him.
“I remember when some of these properties were $80,000, and I saw them go from $80,000 to $160,000, and from $160 [thousand] to $335 [thousand],” Doyle says.
In some neighborhoods, the price jump is staggering. During a February 10 presentation to the Durham County commissioners, Doyle shared examples of home values that made significant leaps since the 2019 appraisal. A home that sold in south Durham jumped from $325,000 in 2018 to $560,000 six years later. In Watts-Hillandale, a west Durham neighborhood, a home skyrocketed 136 percent from $300,000 in 2018 to $710,000 last May.
And in east Durham, just a 10-minute walk from the city center, a home sold for $160,000 in 2020 and a colossal $597,000 just a year later, a 273 percent increase.
“Now, we’re seeing stuff I would have never imagined when I was growing up here,” Doyle told the INDY.
Where is all this demand for Durham properties coming from? Near the onset of the 2010s, Durham saw a spike in new residents as the Bull City’s renaissance started taking shape. The relatively low cost of living compared to larger or similarly sized cities, a flourishing food scene, high-paying tech jobs, and proximity to other amenities like state parks, the beach, and an international airport made Durham attractive to people from across the country.
Doyle also says that climate change could be impacting migration patterns. Raging fires to the west, elongated and more brutal winters to the north, and hurricanes in the Deep South are pushing Americans to plant roots in a different class of city.
“I believe what we’ve seen over the last 10 years is just people being a lot more observant and paying more attention to what’s going on in the world,” Doyle says. “You got a lot of people that just got smart about migrating to an area where we get all four seasons. We’re talking about the greater Piedmont: Wake County, Durham County, Chatham County, Orange County.”
Since 2019, Durham County has added an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 new parcels. Those parcels include residential and commercial properties, vacant land, and some tax-exempt properties like schools and religious institutions. Without annexing land from neighboring counties (or Greenland), new parcels were created by rezoning vacant lots or sprawling properties that only included a few structures and turning them into subdivisions packed with townhomes and apartments, each with their own parcel ID.
With a majority of property values likely going up due to this year’s appraisal, the county board could look to balance the burden on taxpayers by lowering the county tax rate. The county has a significantly larger tax base due to the rise in population and parcel count. In 2024, the Durham County tax rate was 79.87¢ per $100, second highest in the Triangle region following Orange County. Property owners who also live within Durham city limits paid an additional 59.62¢ per $100 in city property taxes for the 2024–25 fiscal year.
Durham County Commission Chair Nida Allam also suggested at the February presentation that the county start publishing more detailed itemized tax bills so residents get a more transparent understanding of how their tax dollars are being spent.
Some Durham County residents suffered sticker shock after receiving their updated property valuation in the mail last month.
For recent homebuyers, the shock of a new valuation is tempered by the fact that the value is fresh in their mind, and the bill is likely divided up and bundled into their monthly mortgage payment. The challenge, Doyle says, is for long-time homeowners who have paid off their homes and don’t have a mortgage. These folks skew older, and some are on fixed incomes. Those residents tend to get their tax bill, often thousands of dollars, all at once, and they have a short window to pay it off.
“That’s why I spent the last year trying to do aggressive community outreach, because the number one issue isn’t about the buyers,” Doyle says. “It’s the people who have owned their home for 20 years and paid it off. They don’t have a mortgage. Those are the people that we want to get to and speak to and make sure that they are aware of what’s going on.”
Folks can appeal the valuation with the Board of Equalization and Review. Applications are due by June 16 before the county commissioners establish a new tax rate for the next fiscal year. Doyle recommends residents take action on their appeals based on the valuation and not their tax bill.
“If they are considering appealing, they need to appeal based on their tax value. Do not wait for your tax bill. Once you get your tax bill, it’s too late. You have to wait until next year. Don’t wait to see what your bill is to appeal. If you’re going to appeal, you need to appeal based on your value, not your bill.”
Most residents appeal in the first year, Doyle says, and then submissions taper off. In 2019, the county received 7,000 appeals (about 5.55 percent), but by 2024, there were only 80. Doyle says the state considers 10 percent of appeals—for Durham, that’s 12,600—as an acceptable measure for an effective reappraisal. Still, tackling a large volume of appeals with limited bandwidth can be daunting for Doyle’s department, so the fewer, the better.
“We want to make sure that we’re able to keep the standard of customer service high while doing that, and it gets harder the more appeals you have. So it’s a good operating number if we can stay around 7,000 or less, but considering this is a historic real estate market, and the market dictates the tax value. If the market was out of this world, unfortunately, the tax rates were, so because of that, I would expect us to have a historic amount of appeals. I don’t want it, but it’s to be expected.”
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