| Real Estate Taxes and Tax Appeal Assessment Loopholes |
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| Written by George Evers |
| Saturday, 16 August 2008 16:04 |
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In certain years a blanket assessment is enacted resulting in a re-assessment of property taxes. Often inaccurate "quick" values are concocted. Many times adjustment is enacted using a multiplier factor to adjust these values. Little time is allocated to this rendering of property value. Ask yourself: if you were an appraisal company bidding on a municipal revaluation contract and your winning bid had only a $40 margin allocated for every home you needed to appraise, how much time would you spend on each property? Being a businessman, you would want to make a profit, so you have to cut out the time spent on each property. Compound that by a hired hand that may have little experience and you could have a hit and miss mess as a result. Property tax assessments derived from blanket assessment abound with errors. These estimations of value are even derived by multipliers of the previous year?s assessment. If the original assessment was wrong, multiplying that assessment adds nothing to clarify the value. An inexpensive fix for the town could come about if building inspectors and the tax department communicated closely by working together. If the building inspector passed on information to the assessor, there would be no need for blanket re-assessments. New homes sold need only be equalized with the previous blanket assessment. If an addition or home improvement took place, the added value could be passed on to the tax assessor. If the building department and tax department worked efficiently, there would be no need for blanket reassessments. The department of the tax assessor is usually small and little time is available for the assessor. Rarely do they appraise a home personally. The tax assessor job is often a politically appointed position. Tax assessors do not take the time and are not generally trained to do a complete market appraisal of a home. Often they use a completely different method (cost method) of appraising a home. When contesting property taxes, only market appraisals count. When your home's price is in alignment with the current selling price of comparable homes in the neighborhood, the values tend to be accurate. Selling prices are dynamic and change all the time. Blanket reassessments of homes are very expensive for a town; the cost is directly passed directly to the budget causing extra tax rate increases. Timely blanket reassessments are a rip off to the taxpayer and a waste of valuable time for all involved. Blanket reassessments are opportunities for appeal because of the high error rate. Homeowners need to do a simple analysis to determine if their home's market value is in line with the assessed value assigned to their home. About the Author: By you using the right comparables and adjustment numbers, you target the real areas for real estate tax appeal that maximize your real estate tax reduction Kindly provided by LJ-Marketing.dk You are welcome to use this article on your own website, if you include the link just before this text. |