When it comes to property taxes, the laws are written on a county by county basis. This means, the considerations for assessing your property, and the rules and time lines for appealing your property’s value are going to be a little bit different in every county.
Many counties have some very specific qualifiers in place that affect the valuation of your home. Some of them you might find surprising. Here are a few examples:
• Contra Costa County, CA places a value on the trees in the homeowner's yard as part of the assessment.
• Broward County, FL tracks the square footage of road frontage instead of the square footage of the property’s lot size.
• Wake County, NC counts the number of bathroom fixtures in their database instead of bathrooms.
• Most counties do not allow homeowners to use foreclosures and short sales as comps in an appeal.
• King County, WA assesses parking spaces separately from condominium units. As a result, condo owners are required to file a separate appeal for parking spaces.
• King County, WA doesnt include the number of bedrooms a property has in their assessment analysis because they don't think it has an effect on the market value of the property. (Yes, they actually said this to us in a phone interview)
• Cuyahoga County, OH requires homeowners to have an appeal notarized, which is likely to discourage appeals.
In most counties the only form of data quality maintenance performed is an assessor “drive by” reevaluation every few years. This, among other common practices, can lead to mistakes in property valuation. An article focusing on Nassau County, New York addresses some major anomalies in property assessments across the county. For example, one 1,300 square-foot ranch home was listed in the county records as having 55 stall showers, 21 extra lavatories and an extra sink in addition to its two full bathrooms. Clearly this record is in error. If indeed, as stated in this article, there are thousands such errors in just the Nassau county assessment records, then what does that tally reach when you look at the whole state of New York? The entire U.S.?
The question becomes: What features of your home should actually affect the property value assessment? In this regard, it is important to be familiar with your county’s valuation process and specifically how your individual property is assessed.
Fortunately, ValueAppeal takes the time to conduct thorough research into what makes a successful appeal in each county that we serve, so you don’t have to get bogged down with the minor details. This means that we take the specific laws from your county into consideration when we evaluate whether you are eligible for appeal and when we compile your custom appeal evidence report.
What quirky or irrational rules exist in your county? Is the assessor considering the appropriate factors when they evaluate your property?
