Tennessee

A great deal of Tennessee’s rural acreage sits in Greenbelt, the Agricultural, Forest and Open Space Land Act of 1976, which taxes qualifying land on its present use rather than its market value.

Agricultural and forest tracts need at least fifteen acres, open space three, and the statute caps enrolment at 1,500 acres per owner per county.

Leaving the programme triggers a rollback assessment, which recovers the tax saved for the current year and the two preceding ones on agricultural and forest land, or five years on open space, and falls due when the land is sold, subdivided, developed or stops qualifying.

Around Nashville, Franklin and the other growth corridors, where market value has pulled away from use value, that rollback is often the largest single number in a land transaction.

Only the portion converted is assessed if the rest of the tract still qualifies, so a seller wants that boundary settled before a price is agreed rather than after.

Houses are assessed at twenty-five per cent of value and commercial property at forty, so a change of classification moves a bill sharply in either direction.

Foreclosure is fast and almost always out of court, with notice published three separate times in the county newspaper, the first at least twenty days before the sale.

Tennessee’s statutory right of redemption is unusually long at two years, but it can be waived in the loan documents and deeds of trust routinely do waive it, so most owners here have no redemption at all and the sale is final on the day.