Should it be? Is it fair? You tell me.

I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but it seems to me Mecklenburg County is violating the spirit — if not the letter — of the requirement that property owners be given 30 days to appeal new valuations. How so?

Because mutli-family assessments are running late — very late — they might not be sent out until after the March 10th deadline for single-family appeals. Even if they do come out in the next few weeks, that would give single-family property owners scant days to incorporate that new data into an overall picture of their neighborhood’s property values.

Let’s consider a hypothetical. Although you’d never know it from the constant carping from the masthead of a Local Paper, Mecklenburg has seen a fair amount of high-density, mixed-use development in recent years. The type that mixes townhomes, condos, and single-family housing close together. Also at the height of the local real estate bubble a good number of small in-fill projects attempted to maximize density — and hence profits — with multiple units in otherwise single-family developments. As a result there exists some number of homeowners who have received their reval notices while their neighbors have not — and will not for some time.

Now imagine that those multi-family revals come out. You live in a single-family home adjacent to a six or eight unit dwelling, Happy Place Gardens. They sold new in 2006 for, say, $225,000 each. A couple have changed hands since then, one at nearly the same price another for significantly less — representing the wildly fluctuating market for such units. The county’s new reval for the units gives then a market value of $200,000 each — an 11 percent decline, one completely in line with recent trends for multi-family units in Charlotte.

Further imagine that single-family sales of homes like yours near Happy Place showed roughly the same pattern. Sold new for $330,000, some resales near that number, but prices falling by 10 to 15 percent in 2009 and 2010. Yet your reval number is $335,666, more than you expected, but nothing you thought worth appealing. Until you saw the Happy Place numbers and…oops now it is too late.

Yes, we are comparing apples to oranges somewhat, but the single-family homeowner would have to wonder why empirical sales data seemed to have an impact on the county’s valuation of Happy Place apples, but not on his orange.

Or have I gone bananas?

Update: The 2011 values are plugged into the county database now.