Meet Sajjan Dhaliwal, local builder of custom homes.

According to Mecklenburg County online property records, Dhaliwal and his company Jas-Am currently owe $85,000 in 2008 property taxes and penalties, including over $68,000 on his new $5m. estate on five acres near the intersection of Marvin and Ardrey Kell in South Charlotte.

But it is the properties held by Jas-Am that are most instructive about the situation Charlotte’s high-end real estate market now finds itself in. The company lists a near $2m. home in Lake Wylie’s Sanctuary subdivision as currently available. Yet the $2700 tax bill on the lot valued at $257,000 is unpaid.

Even more telling, the property offered for sale at $1.1m. in The Palisades has a $8100 tax bill due on its $786K tax value for 2008 plus tax still due from a 2007 valuation of $477K. In fact, county records show that last November a check from Jas-Am was returned for insufficient funds.

There are several things to pay attention to here, plus a fascinating wrinkle concerning who Dhaliwal opted to give his money to instead of pay his tax bills.

One is that the expected sales price of these homes are not reflected in the assessed value. This would not matter except for the case that these spec builders are not remotely prepared to carry these properties on their books for very long. These does not make them bad people, it is just that their business model assumed ever-increasing home values and quick sales so that they were in effect always riding the escalator up.

We’ve seen this situation before from Charlotte’s smaller, boutique builders and frankly no one can predict how they will come out of the current housing correction. If they can sit tight and hold onto their lots, they should be OK. But what will that mean come, say, September when the county is set to finally reval those properties?

As for Dhaliwal’s priorities, state campaign records indicate that he and his wife made over $6000 in campaign contributions last year, most of it to Pat McCrory’s run for governor.

Maybe what is left of the McCrory campaign should help pay down some of that outstanding tax bill.