Upset about your Chatham County tax assessment? Here’s what I did

By Burney Waring

Pittsboro, NC – We got a new tax assessment, as I guess you did. When I was trying to understand it, I ended up at the handy Chatham Tax Record site, looked up my property and clicked on ‘Tax Card’. I got a pdf file that explains how they arrived at the valuation number. It includes our extra garage and pool. Most of it made sense.

But, I found my garage size was listed at 8,070 square feet, which is too big by a factor of more than three. Subsequently, I made an appeal that should knock $100k off my valuation.

In trying to understand my pool valuation numbers, I looked up some other tax cards in our neighborhood and found two of them that have grossly-oversized pool values. The ‘units’ column value on the tax card for a pool is square feet. A normal pool is about 700 square feet, but one was listed at 1,870 sq. ft. and another at 1,200 sq. ft.

A friend found that they had a valuation that included the neighbor’s carport and building.

Given that I only looked at a few documents and found at least three large mistakes, I suggest you have a look at your Tax Card for mistakes and typos.

I called the county number at (919)542-8211 and spoke to one of the appraisers. They were very nice and helpful in explaining all my numbers and getting my appeal entered.

Here is the tax record site.

Here is the appeal site.

Good luck!