The next shock for homeowners: Surging property tax assessments
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
1. Talk to your neighbors and see what their assessments are like. In our city, assessments are done by "neighborhood", which in my case is 1 street of 85 houses.
2. Collect sales literature on houses for sale near you. This will point out all of the features of the house such as a finished basement that may not be reflected in city records. Ex: someone buys a house for $250K, puts a kitchen, 2 bedrooms and a media room in the unfinished basement, then sells the house for $400K. If the city records say that house still has an unfinished basement, assessed values for all houses in the neighborhood will go up unrealistically. If you take the flyer to the Assessor's office, you can use it to protest the increase in your house which still has an unfinished basement.
3. Get an appraisal of your house if you get an unreasonable reassessment. In our city, they will not fight against an appraisal. Best thing is to get an appraisal for a loan because those tend to be lower.
4. If your neighbor gets an appraisal, use it to protest your assessment. I and another neighbor used a 3rd neighbor's assessment to protest our values.
5. Assessed values are usually public record. You can do some research and will find that values are all over the map. Use the ones to your advantage to protest your assessment. This would be a great startup idea, because the data is in a mish-mash of systems and difficult to access and compare.
6. I am a firm believer in protesting assessments for the simple reason that if everyone did it, or did it more often, it would overload the Assessor's office staff and they would have no choice but to do more reasonable assessments. I regularly compare my assessments with my neighbors and my assessments have gone up slower than my neighbors for the last several years, IMO because I have protested them twice.