Has anyone successfully contested a home reassessment?
 

This is for the kid's house in Iowa. We bought it about 2 years ago during peak real estate pricing, so of course that's the number they're going to use. The thing is, the house right next door was built off the same plans, has a newer roof and brand new siding, and it's assessed $14,000 lower. There's also the same house across the street, massive remodel last year, still $9000 lower than our house. There's about 16 or 17 houses with identical floor plans in this neighborhood, so it isn't that hard to compare them.

I talked to someone in the assessor's office today, and he said they went off ours being nicer on the inside. I've never been inside either of the other houses, but they can't be much worse than this one. All they did before selling this one was paint everything gray, and lay down some LVP flooring in the kitchen, living room, and the rec room in the basement. The cabinets are unchanged. Maybe the countertops were replaced, but they're laminate, there's nothing "luxury" anywhere in this house. He's going to send a guy out to look at it, but I'm not expecting anything to happen.

Good luck

I used to contest mine every year, because every year they raised it 5%, no matter what. They generally have nothing to go on other than the statutory language limits them to a 5% raise, per year, where I used to live. They knew absolutely nothing about the house, apart from where it was, and what it looked like on the outside.

I did my research, found comparable sales in the area that were favorable to my case, and generally won.

Yes, and it happens all the time. One of my houses had been over-valued tax wise for years, but I was reluctant to "get on their radar", figuring they would just "get me back" on the acreage it was on. Then, two years ago, they bumped it another 30K (just the house) and some "out buildings" doubled. After contacting the county's guy, all it took was sending him some pics, and he reduced the house value by 100K .... he was awesome and it was painless.

That was in a more rural county .... my houses (two I recently sold) that are "in cities", shot up in tax value last year, but still lag behind the "real market value" by a significant amount. Shhhhhh ... :D

Good luck!

I think the answer is "it depends." I have heard of people winning this argument here in Oregon, but very very few do.

If you are concerned about a 14K value difference, I am not certain it is worth your efforts.

Me? Somehow my home was assessed missing two bedrooms and 400 sq feet. I have been winning the assessment game every year since I moved in 18 years ago.

We grieve most every year. There are attorneys here that do it for you on a no reduction in tax, no fee basis. You give them 50-60% of the first years savings.

My taxes are lower than they were 15 years ago….

^^^^^ This! For 14K in tax value ..... meh. My uncle was irate about his house's tax assessment increase in that rural county.... but it was still based upon decades old info too .... I told him "let it go".

I was getting ready to pay my primary house's annual ins. premium which had additional "riders" for some of my other houses.... contacted them to drop a house I just sold .... expecting a reduction. The new total premium increased 2x the amount of the rider I removed :(.

Bastids :D!

I've protested assessments on my home & rental properties. Gather up your comps & research on any recent sales, not just in your neighborhood, but throughout the market area. Any pictures you can add are helpful. Assessors are not all ***holes. Be nice & friendly. Hear him out & try to counter his assumptions. It's worth a shot.

"Sale price through a third-party Realtor(tm)" = "Arm's length transaction" = "Fair market value"

The fair basis upon which taxation should occur.

Even if your area doesn't have caps, and is dynamic, the one across the street should have been re-assessed.
That is favoritism, discrimination, and fraud.

Get a real-estate lawyer. Get an independent appraisal or two.
Do a LOT of research for past sales nearby.
I had to go to from local board of review to state tax tribunal level three times to get fair taxation.
One involved an expensive lawyer. It paid for itself within two years.

A thousand fleas upon local tax boards.
I will pay $1M over the next 40 years for two small houses..owned over a decade
Yeah. I did the math.

Does anyone wonder why rents are so high? That's why!

Assessed value always lags behind appraised values, often way behind. Why? Simple. Because if assessor offices assessed at appraised value, half of homeowners would lawyer-up and the assessor's office would need a legal staff of thousands.

Here:
'Assessed value' is what the current market valuation is supposed to be. Whatever they decide to put on paper. Vaporware numbers.
'Taxable value' is capped and limited to a small multiplier each year. About 1% here.

How does an assessor know what the inside of your house looks like? I've never heard of an indoor inspection.

Check with local laws, but I believe assessment should legally be based on sales comps, bedrooms, bathrooms, sq ft, lot size, other structures.....only.
(that's iirc from the 2nd gen professional family assessor)

Landscaping, interior decor, etc might not be permissible by law. A golden toilet counts the same as paper mache.

Ours went from 97,500 (which it has been since 1997) to 244,500 this year!

^^^^ Ouch! That might be a legitimate current assessment tho' ..... considering the time. Houses in this area have never had huge increases historically.... but the past few years prices have skyrocketed in comparison. Long periods since the last tax evaluation then become "sticker shock". Is that a realistic assessment based upon the current housing market in your area?

We contested the county's valuation last year and hired our own appraisal, scheduled a meeting with them. We explained the situation, presented his valuation which was @$15k less. They accepted with no drama. Our real-estate taxes were lower this year. Our tax advisor couldn't believe it.

The assessment for my apartment building jumped big time a year ago. I was gearing up for a fight, collecting data, etc. I emailed the assessors office to get the process down. A guy called me back and asked a few questions about the building. Oops, he said. We used the wrong bedroom/bath combos. It was listed in the system as 3 bed/1 bath units when our software changed. Nope, all 2 bed/1bath. Fixed, sorry.

We just bought this house in June of 2021. That was pretty close to peak market at the time, and we paid over the listing price. Having a new granddaughter, and not wanting her to grow up in a s-hole house will lead you to doing things like that.

The assessor's office saw the same photos I did on the realtor's website, they're still out there, and from the pictures it looks really nice inside. But if you see it in person, you can see it's just a coat of paint and some other cheap updates to make it look nice.

Someone from the assessor's office is stopping by around noon today to look at the house in person. Maybe the son-in-law's fits of rage or whatever will pay off, since there's broken siding now by the front door, and somebody kicked out the center of one of the cabinet doors under the sink.

Are the guys saying to not concern myself with a $14k assessment the same guys complaining about the price of haircuts? 14k on the assessment is a couple hundred in property taxes. That buys a few haircuts.

Each jurisdiction will have their own regs, but they don't always follow their own laws

After fruitlessly battling the local tax authorities on my own i hired a lawyer , we went to court where the judge told them to follow their own regulations, saves me thousands a year

That's the way to do it. ^ This is right, for around here. But it does happen and is is sad when greedy counties decide to experiment with squeezing harder.

It's always bad enough getting mugged, but when they demand your shoes too...

Around here, the tax assessments that accounted for last year's increases are still significantly behind real market appreciation and what they were in June of 2021. Just like with my homeowner's insurance .... removing a "rider" (last Sept), caused them to rerun the numbers and cost me $200 more this year. I personally would not question a 14K difference .... and I cut my own hair too :D.

If you do have 'caps' limiting increases to a small percent every year...be wary of remodels...or so I've heard.

Remodeling bathrooms/kitchens or adding any type of square footage might be cause for reassessment.

Yes, and offices of public agencies have no control over how much staff they can have or how much they can spend. A county assessor can pick fights with local homeowners, but cannot expand its budget to address the costs of those fights. Public agencies have some advantages. They (usually) have the law on their side which gives them certain authorities and powers (granted by a legislature). But they are defenseless when it comes to financial and staffing resources. They differ from private companies in this way.

Yes, it should never be the job of representative govt to find ways to squeeze more and more money out of people, esp. using their own laws that benefit only the squeezers, but not the squeezees.

Yet here we are.

I did this once successfully in an upstate NY county (admittedly long ago). I provided 3 comps to the assessor's office after challenging the new assessment during the period when you could do that. It was a small win, but it helped a little. I was told then the only way they could consider a change was if they had actual market evidence. I have no idea if that is still the way it's done. I know commercial property owners use professional appraisers to challenge assessments ($$$), know as a certiorari challenge in NY Supreme Court.

When I was a practicing atty in Pa, if you appealed they pretty much knocked 10% off to avoid a hassle. Moved to Va, had a 30% increase first year in (2019) so I figured it was the Pa deal and appealed. I'm apparently a ****ehead. Guy shows up, says, we had your house in avg condition/below avg, looked at my kitchen and said, its above, here's your add'l 15% over what the increase was.
I just greased it up and let him do his thing and moved on wiser.

Someone from the assessors office toured the inside of the house on Thursday. I haven't heard back from them, so I'm not expecting much. The thing is, they've got me. I overpaid for the house, because everybody overpaid the last couple of years. They want to value it at what I paid for it. But here's what I think is my out.

Point (a) - the guy I talked to on the phone basically admitted they undervalued the other homes in the neighborhood. Maybe the whole city. My point is, if you undervalued them, undervalue mine by a similar amount. That's all I'm asking.

It almost always goes to court if you use a service. The town doesn’t want to reduce their income, ever. The court is funded separately…

I get a reduction pretty much every year except for one where it went to the arbitration board and they got pissed at me for proving they were putting the proverbial "thumb on the scale" so to punish me I left owning more than I did when I went in.

The sad part of a tax based on how nice your house/property is, is that it disincentives upkeep. I've seen a good bit of this in Hawaii.

CA locks-down the taxable base at purchase price - they don't have this problem.

Most other places: Nice place you have there - give us more money.

Houses are reassessed every 5 years here (and are almost always lower than real market value ... even if no appreciation). Does CA really do that .... hard to fathom a house being taxed at what it was purchased for decades ago.

Same here.

We have Appraised / Market Value and then Assessed Value.

Assessed is the value our taxes are calculated against.

So on every sale the first year your Appraised and Assessed will match.

But Assessed is capped to a max increase of 10% over previous year.

Since the 1st Assessed value sets the base it should be grieved every year even if the increase comes in under the 10% cap.

I have neighbors who after 15 years are now paying $10k more per year than I am because they never bothered and are now freaking out.

I have a couple of neighbors who when I'd ask over the years how well they did with their protest actually told me they don't protest because "why would we do that? We don't want our property value to depreciate"

Yeah that's not how any of that works, Morons.

When I owned in Cook County in IL, I protested every year. It is almost a joke in the county. The are several law firms that specialize in this area. I paid $50 and after the reassessment, these firms would take a percentage of the savings. It is/was almost automatic - like the fix was in.

I learned this after I tried to do this on my own. I would look up "comps" and submit. It went nowhere - not until I contacted one of the law firms who specialized in this service.

I got a reduction.
Like I said, the neighbor's house, which is the same floorplan, and has newer siding and roof, is assessed $14k less than mine.

They came down $10k. Good enough.

Per their city statutes, they reassess every 2 years. My house in WI hasn't been reassessed in 6 years or more, mainly because we're a small town and we'd have to hire a firm to come in and do the work.

I almost got burned when I sold my mother's condo. It was assessed at $140k for forever, but the comps didn't match that, we listed it for $100k, got an offer of $90k and took it. One less headache for the estate. While we were in escrow the city reassessed it at $100k, had to get the buyers to sign off on the new assessment. Luckily it went through.

Here you go.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1682358552.JPG

per: https://homesitewiz.com/buy-house/are-california-property-taxes-based-on-purchase-price-or-assessed-value.html

So they do raise it with inflation, but the rate won't decrease if you let it fall apart. IOW, they incentivize people to take care of their property.

In the real estate fall circa 2010 many CA residents petitioned to have their properties reassessed due to up to 30% loss in value. I believe many cases did get reassessment.

I say leave well enough alone.