The dramatic rise in real estate prices over the last few years isn’t good for everyone.

However, it turns out that it will be even much better than previously thought for Guilford County government, as county officials finish up the calculations that determine exactly how much additional money the county can get from property taxes due to the 2022 countywide revaluation of all property.

Since virtually every home business and other piece of property in Guilford County is worth more after the 2022 revaluation by the Guilford County Tax Department, new estimates are that the county will pull in an extra $75 million to $80 million in property tax money if the current tax rate is not lowered.

Until recently, county officials were guesstimating that that number would come in closer to $55 million to $60 million.  That’s still a very nice bump but now it seems clear the county will have a lot more to spend.

An additional $75 million or $80 million is more than 10 percent of the county’s entire budget, which currently totals about $675 million.

Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston said current analysis of preliminary revaluation numbers suggest that the additional property tax revenue will be over $75 million and he said that that additional money will give the commissioners an opportunity to do a lot more things without increasing the property tax rate.

That additional money will be collected every year until the next revaluation in four years.  Currently, the county is on a five-year revaluation cycle, but several top county officials said the plan is to change that to a four-year cycle.  That will likely be done when the county’s 2021-2022 fiscal budget is adopted in June.

Currently, the county’s property tax rate stands at 73.05 cents per $100 of assessed property value.  Every one-cent increase in the county’s property tax rate raises roughly an additional $6 million in new revenue. Likewise, a one-cent tax decrease would reduce revenue by about $6 million.

That means that the Board of Commissioners could reduce the tax rate by about 13 cents and raise the same amount of property tax revenue the county did last year.

There are a whole lot of options currently being discussed by the Democratic-majority led Board of Commissioners right now, but keeping the tax rate at the revenue neutral level which would reduce the current rate by about 13 cents, is not one of them.