Advice on Registering a Historic Property in Virginia

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone,

I’m in the process of purchasing a property that holds a piece of history, featuring an original farmhouse from the late 1700s. I would love to hear from anyone who has experience with registering a property as a Virginia historic landmark.

What are the pros and cons you've encountered? Specifically, I’m interested in aspects like tax relief benefits and any potential limitations on renovations or other considerations.

Thanks in advance!

[Anonymous]

I live in an 1800s registered historic property with a plaque in Maryland (Montgomery county). It is the namesake for a large part of our area and the people who lived here, you will see their names on roads and parks in Montgomery County. This used to be a 440 acre property. It is connected to a number of other historic properties in Montgomery County and DC because of the people who originally entitled the land in 1790 and lived here over the years.

If your property is not yet listed, there are a lot of headaches that come along with having a listed property. You should know before doing this that it will severely hamper any future changes that you might wish to make to your property. Once it’s listed, you will have FAR less freedom on things that you might want or need to do to with your home and the property it sits on. So I would think carefully.

My spouse and I wanted to have some work done to our house - something very simple - and that required not only an application to our HOA, but we also had to take an application to the historic preservation Society.

It extended the amount of time that it took for the work to get completed instead of something simple requiring maybe a month worth of application time it was 15 months in the end because the historic preservation commission. People who are probably worse than your local HOA on steroids. A ton of extra money in time. It can also lead to increased expenses.

Living in a historic home is absolutely a source of pride and if you’re a history buff like me, it is exciting to read about my home in the history books and know that it has a place of not only local but national significance. The local Montgomery County historical Society, gifted a large bankers box of papers when we moved here. There have been novels written about some of the people who lived in our home both fiction and non-fiction. We have copies of those as well.

However, back to real life for a moment,if you have a need for any renovations or exterior updates, even painting the outside of your house, redoing your landscaping or need to chop down a tree because it’s rotting, the number of mother may I people that you need to ask if you can even do the things that you need to do is truly difficult to deal with sometimes.

The sellers of this house actually sold the home because they couldn’t make the changes that they wanted to, and it sat on the market for quite some time without being sold until they were able to find a buyer -my spouse- who cared about the historic status of the house and didn’t mind being constrained for how the house would look now and forever.

So yes, there are certain tax exemptions, and it is cool. Having a plaque next year front door and having the county put a historical marker on the sidewalk in front of our street. Just understand that you have a blessing in a person owning a historic home and that you should be well prepared for extended delays for Anything requiring upgrades, renovations or even landscaping changes.

Good luck

[Anonymous]

One huge benefit is you usually can file for a “facade easement” and take a huge tax deduction because typically historic designation doesn’t care too much what you do to the interior but you are quite restricted what you can do to the exterior…especially what is generally visible to the public.

You get an appraisal company familiar with historic designation to come up with a value for this easement and a charity that accepts your donation and it’s as though you made a large charitable donation that you can write off your taxes.

I agree with PP that you likely are restricting your resale value so in theory this helps make up for it.