quarkkm

quarkkm t1_j2c7m0s wrote

Reply to Is there anyone out there with success/experience in challenging property tax assessments? by Kooky_Deal9566

We challenged ours about a year ago by video. The state will provide worksheets of how other properties are assessed for I think $1 each. They also will tell you what comps they used. In our case, our house is 725 sq feet plus a finished basement built 100 years ago and updated piecemeal over the years. The comps the state used were three houses that had been torn down and completely rebuilt including the foundation in the last 5 years. All houses were >3k SQ feet and one was almost 6k. Like, sure, they adjusted for square footage but it seemed like an incredibly dishonest choice of comps.

We found multiple houses in about a 3 block radius around us that had sold recently. All three houses were fairly in line with ours, 700-1000 square feet plus basements, older and not very updated. We then requested their assessment worksheets and figured out that the main difference was in the depreciation percentage. During our video appeal we concentrated on showing how old and crappy the stuff in our house is to show that our depreciation was similar to the other comps and not to a brand new house. Things like broken cabinet doors and really stained counters, the 50s bathroom, the complete lack of insulation, the early 80s boiler and 20 year old AC. We provided our comps also and pictures of some stuff that was hard to see on the video.

Our house had been assessed for $150k more than we paid for it in 2017. We were able to get 55k knocked off. I still think it's too high but we did add a garage and fighting it more seemed not worth it.

Oh yeah, and after the appeal we could not get an answer from sdat as to the final disposition within even close to the legal timeline and after multiple attempts to follow up. I ended up needing to contact my state delegate to extract the answer. They were pretty responsive until then so no idea what happened there.

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