June 2024 Charlottesville property transactions: House on Alderman Road purchased and plans have been filed to redevelop with six townhouses by-right

Another anecdotal look at property transactions in a market where the rules have been changed to encourage more density

We are at the end of July and five months have passed since the City of Charlottesville’s new development code went into effect. This month features the first time where a residential property sold in one month and an application to maximize the density was filed a month later. Those details will be in the next regular edition, but that is clearly the highlight for this monthly transaction-by-transaction look at the real estate market. 

This edition of the newsletter is one I do every month for paid subscribers first. The idea is to entice readers who aren’t paying to contribute to the business that allows me to spend so much of my time paying attention to real estate and land use. 

If you want to wait, this will be posted to Information Charlottesville sometime next week where the previous 41 months of previous transaction reports are kept. Go look! I want as many people to understand the dynamics as possible.

When I left journalism briefly in the summer of 2018 I had a lot of things I wanted to know and came back to journalism two years later because I felt people had absolutely no idea what was happening with the market. 

Myself included.

Now I offer you these anecdotes as I’ve done since January 2021 in order to provide a moving snapshot. Who is buying what properties? How much is the city adding to its tax base? Are people selling properties maximizing their wealth, or are people being taken advantage of by smooth talkers who talk down their worth? What about affordable housing? What will assessments be in 2025? 

I don’t answer these questions directly in this, but this basic act of journalistic research is how I keep spinning out stories about this changing community. That’s what my paid subscribers want me to do, and I’m going to keep doing it as long as I can.

As always, I point out the 2020 assessment and the 2024 assessment for most transactions. I want people to get the sense of how much the city’s tax base has grown. The city’s 2019 Land Book listed 15,071 taxable properties that brought in $72,657,974 in real property tax revenues The land book for this year, dated April 1, lists 15,114 parcels bringing in $104,649,940. 

And that’s BEFORE the City Council voted to increase the tax rate an additional two cents to $0.98 percent of assessed value. The additional funding has allowed the city to comfortably increase spending and meet the Affordable Housing Plan moral goal of putting $10 million a year of local taxpayer money toward subsidizing the cost of housing. 

A lot is happening and it has happened in just a few years. What will happen next? I’ll keep writing about it.  No highlights this month, though, as I want to get one more final regular newsletter in for this month.