Is Your Connecticut Real Estate Overtaxed?
February 10th, 2009 categories: Home Owners
CBS News’ Early Show had a segment on this morning to remind people to take a close look at their property’s assessment by their town to check for inaccuracies. There’s no time like the present.
An assessment is the value your town/city place on your real estate for tax collection purposes. Every few years, the town hires a company to do a revaluation and the company does an appraisal. Generally, the assessment is 70% of the value in the appraisal and you pay taxes based on the assessment (multiplied by the mill rate).
The issues with these appraisals is that more often than not, no person actually enters the home being appraised. Maybe a drive by is done but maybe not. As a result, “the inaccuracy rate on home assessments is between 30 and 50 percent, depending on the region (according to the National Taxpayers Union).”
Also, given that the act of revaluation is at the discretion of towns/cities, they get to control the frequency. My guess is that you’ll see less revaluations when real estate markets are in the tank in order to keep that property tax revenue coming in.
And how often do you see devaluations, too?
These same towns have a pretty good handle on auto assessments, I normally do not have a problem with their depreciation curves. So now perhaps they need to account for real estate depreciation?
Not enough home buyers know what their property tax is going to be- but with sites like zillow.com that actually show the taxes on the books, that makes it easier than going down to the town assessor and sifting through the books.
Given there are so many variables in the true, quantitative value to your home and property, I doubt there will ever be an exact and current tax value to it. The market price involves that and also the qualitative value, which the home owner and buyer are much more aware of. Those two values can have a significant gap, which tends to show itself in the cases of tax valuation, appraisal, and market price.
Towns have to do revaluations every 5 years by CT law. Property valuations will go lower but taxes won’t…that’s for sure.
I wish you could devalue real estate like a car but there are way too many variables.
The issue with town valuations is that the property info they use is often wrong. For example, the town records have the square footage wrong, rate the condition of a house incorrectly, have incorrect number of bedrooms, baths etc. That incorrect info skews the entire value.
Once again, the NAR, still telling people now is the time to buy, BLAH BLAH BLAH. Home many of their lies have to be released to the media for dissemination to people who cannot afford homes ? How many people have bought homes and seen the value go below the value of their mortgage causing the bank to call the loan ? I dont know about you, but there are no less than 8 abandoned homes in the area I live in. Homes where the snow is no longer shoveled making them easy to spot as abandoned.
The best time to buy will be when the bottom hits, and until sellers decide to drop their prices to pre-1995 levels, the inventory problem wont be solves and the bankster/gangsters wont be loaning TARP money to Johnny Public.
Now is not the time to buy, expect no spring surge in sales of homes in CT.
NAR has lost a lot of credibility it had but remember what NAR is…a lobbying group to promote interests of real estate agents.
One question, how will you know when the bottom hits? The only way to know for sure is when prices are higher and there are more sales, so technically if you wait until the bottom, you missed it already.
In some markets, now is the time to buy. I’m not saying that to make more money…since I definitely am honest with home sellers about the value of their home, sometimes losing me a listing. But, to make a blanket statement that you shouldn’t buy is just as irresponsible as saying everyone should buy.