Why Orange County's Tax Card Is a Poor Guide to What Rural Acreage Is Worth

At 1:54 p.m. on September 30, 2025, Orange County's Board of Equalization and Review heard the appeal on 57.66 acres of vacant land in Mebane, split down the middle by Mt. Willing Road. The county had assessed it at $605,400. The appeal asked for $409,194, using nearby land sales that averaged $7,097 an acre. County representative Kelly Wells answered that those sales "are not qualified sales and cannot be considered," according to the Board of Equalization and Review minutes. The county then recommended raising the parcel's land adjustment from -30% to -40% to account for the road splitting the tract, the topography and the streams that cross it. The board voted unanimously for the county's figure of $518,900, which works out to about $9,000 an acre.

Later, on the same road, the Mebane City Council voted to pay $30,000 an acre for land.

So one stretch of Mt. Willing Road produced three very different per-acre figures. The spread is the useful part. In rural Orange County, the county's land value is built on very thin sales evidence. The price an acre actually brings depends mostly on who is buying it and what they plan to do with it. In September 2026 the county released an independent audit of its 2025 revaluation, and the audit shows how thin that evidence is.

One Road, Three Prices

The Mebane purchase came up at a budget work session on Thursday, April 9, as News of Orange reported. In a pair of votes that weren't unanimous, the council approved buying the 50-acre Seven Mile Farm along West Ten Road and Mount Willing Road for $30,000 an acre, $1.5 million in total. The site sits south of the I-40/I-85 interchange. The plan calls for four multipurpose athletic fields, a playground, basketball courts and tennis/pickleball courts.

Put next to each other, the figures look like this:

For context on the last row, USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service put North Carolina farm real estate at $5,750 an acre in 2026, up 5.1% from 2025. Cropland averaged $5,580 and pasture $6,380. Those are statewide averages for land priced as farmland. The city paid more than four times the pasture figure because it was buying flat, buildable ground near an interstate interchange for ballfields. It was not buying pasture.

The two tracts aren't identical. One is cut by a road and has streams running through it, and the other was chosen because the ground suited a cluster of fields. That difference is what matters. On land like this, a few physical facts and one motivated buyer can move the price by a factor of three.

The County Was Working With Very Few Land Sales

In May 2026, Orange County hired GAR Associates, working with Josh Myers Valuation Solutions, to audit the revaluation that took effect January 1, 2025. Their final report is dated September 27, 2026, and makes 30 recommendations. Its findings on vacant land help explain the Mt. Willing Road spread:

1. Most areas had no land sales to work from. The county sorts property into neighborhoods for valuation. Over a four-year period, 67.21% of those neighborhoods had no vacant land sale at all, and only 2.72% had five or more. The auditors called the neighborhoods "far too narrowly" drawn and "mostly unsuitable for market analysis."
2. Land prices were set by hand. Appraisers set base land prices one neighborhood at a time.
3. The acreage table is at least ten years old. The county adjusts land value for parcel size with a table called SA9. It's built so that value doesn't rise in a straight line as acreage grows. The auditors wrote that this relationship "should be fit to the local market," and that the table "has not been recalibrated in at least ten years."
4. Adjustments for land features are overused. The county's adjustments for things like road splits, topography and streams were "both over-used and inconsistently applied at times," and "the vast majority of the time" were used to lower values. The cut on the Mt. Willing Road tract, from -30% to -40%, was one of these adjustments.
5. The county doesn't screen sales consistently. Before using a sale as evidence, an assessor has to decide whether it was a normal, arm's-length deal. The audit found Orange County does not do this "as a complete process in a consistent manner according to a clear set of policies and procedures."

Put those together and appeals become the main way land values get corrected. Vacant land, residential and commercial property were appealed at similar rates. Vacant land values fell the most on appeal, an average of 21.51%, compared with 9.22% for commercial and 7.31% for residential. Once an owner brought in specifics about a tract, land values moved further than any other kind of property.

The Same Problem Shows Up Under the House

The audit also suggests the land share of value on homes in Orange County is probably too high. On improved residential property other than condos, land is usually 20% to 30% of total value. In Orange County the median is about 38%, and for a quarter of those properties land is 49% or more. The auditors wrote that this likely points to land values "that make up a greater percentage of total property value than is supportable."

Large lots don't explain it. The audit noted that the median residential lot in the county is 0.63 acres and only about 8% of improved residential properties sit on more than ten acres.

That matters when you're pricing a country home, barn and pasture together. The tax card divides the total between land and buildings, and the audit found the county leans on land value to stand in for location. The tax card doesn't show what the acreage under a farmhouse would bring on its own. Land under present-use value is a separate track. That land is valued at use rates set by the state, and the county has a compliance appraiser who checks that the designations are assigned correctly.

Accurate Overall, Scattered Tract by Tract

Overall, vacant land met every acceptable IAAO standard. The median sales ratio was 92.02%, meaning assessments came in at about 92% of sale prices at the midpoint, and the coefficient of dispersion was 18.34%. The dispersion figure measures how widely the ratios of assessment to sale price spread around that median. A spread of about 18% means the county's land roll met the standard in aggregate while individual sales still landed at a range of ratios.

The audit also tested whether vacant land prices moved over time in its sample and found "not a statistically significant market condition (i.e. time) trend" across 2025 and 2026 sales. In practice, the land market in that sample didn't rise or fall as a group. The differences came from the tracts themselves: frontage, slope, water, road splits and nearness to an interchange.

That's why one tax value can be close for one tract and far off for the one next to it. The assessed value is a reasonable starting point for the county as a whole. For a specific 40- or 60-acre parcel, it tells you very little about the price.

What the Bill Looks Like, and When the Values Move Next

For FY2026-27, Orange County's property tax rate is 68.05 cents per $100 of assessed value. At that rate, the county share alone on the Mt. Willing Road tract's $518,900 value comes to about $3,531 a year. At the original $605,400 it would have been about $4,120. At the FY2026-27 rate, that $589 annual difference came from one adjustment for a road and some streams.

The current values are likely to stay in place for a while. The audit recommends doing the next revaluation in 2029 as scheduled. It also recommends moving to a more frequent two-year cycle, with any change waiting until after 2029. At an August 17, 2026 meeting of the county's property tax work group, tax office staff presented plans for the 2029 revaluation. The plans included earlier planning, sales qualification, training, quality assurance and a review of how neighborhoods are drawn.

When the commissioners took up the audit in October, Board Chair Jean Hamilton told The Daily Tar Heel that she hopes the recommendations, including combining neighborhoods and clearer documentation, will be in place before 2029. She said the first step would be hiring a consultant to plan the changes. "My assumption was that what they learned from that, they would change the way they did revaluations, and that didn't happen," Hamilton told the paper, speaking about the 2021 cycle. Until the changes are made, any acreage that sells between now and 2029 does so against land values the audit described as set by hand, from sparse sales, with an old acreage table.

Questions Landowners and Buyers Ask

Does a parcel's assessed value predict what acreage will sell for? Only roughly. Across the county, vacant land assessments landed near 92% of sale prices. On Mt. Willing Road, though, the board's value of about $9,000 an acre sat between roughly $7,000 in comparable sales and $30,000 paid by a public buyer.

If a tract's value was cut on appeal, does that mean the land is worth less? It means the county accepted evidence about that particular tract, such as a road splitting it, the slope or the streams on it. Those same features matter to buyers. For a buyer planning ballfields or a building site, they can matter more or less than they did to the county.

When will these values change? The audit recommends the next countywide revaluation in 2029, with any move to a two-year cycle coming after that.

Tax assessments and appeals depend on the facts of each parcel. This post is general information and not legal, tax or financial advice, so check your own situation with a qualified appraiser, tax professional or attorney.

On land like this, the price comes from what's on the ground: the frontage, the streams and the use the next buyer has in mind. If you're weighing a sale or a purchase in Orange County and want a per-acre opinion built from the tract itself, Legacy Farms & Ranches of North Carolina can walk the land with you and put together a valuation based on what a buyer would actually pay for it. Talk to a Land Specialist.