Category — Property Taxes

I’m a fan of good news, so I wanted to share something with you. A property owner I helped last December just got word that the Sacramento County Assessor has agreed with my opinion of value for his property. They had previously assessed his Elk Grove home for 2009 property taxes at $945,000, but my company provided detailed support to show his assessed value should be at $750,000. The Assessor’s office agreed!!! This means the home owner will receive a refund check around $2,000 because he overpaid on property taxes in 2009.

This particular home owner contacted me literally a couple of days before the deadline to dispute property taxes last year. It’s a good thing he reached out too because otherwise that $2,000 refund check wouldn’t be showing up in the mail.

As a side note, when an appeal is filed and the Assessor ends up agreeing with the appeal, they’ll send you a “Tax Change Withdrawal of Application for Changed Assessment.” Basically this means they are asking you to formally agree to the new opinion of assessed value and simultaneously withdraw your appeal. Usually home owners I help have some questions during this phase because nobody wants to sign something that sounds so unfamiliar. But if the value looks good, you should sign off. There is no reason to keep the appeal in process or pursue an appeals hearing if the Assessor has already agreed to an accurate reduced value. 

I love stories like this and I’ve been hearing quite a few of them lately too. It never gets old to hear a home owner will get a refund check of $2,000. Keep me posted if it looks like you might need help or if you simply want me to check out if there is a potential savings for you. Call me at 916.595.3735 or see www.SacramentoTaxAppeals.com.

This is a quick reminder that new property tax assessments will be coming out for Sacramento County on July 6, 2010. The Sacramento County Assessor will post them on their website here. Make sure to check out your property to ensure the Assessor has your house valued correctly. These new assessment figures should be based on the value of your property on January 1, 2010. Please let me know if you have any questions and see my property tax appeal website if you think you might be a candidate to dispute your property taxes or if you’d like us to investigate your property further (for free).

By the way, I just got word last week that the Assessor agreed to reduce property taxes by 28% for a local home owner I helped last year. That’s what I like to hear!!!

If you live in the Greater Sacramento Region and you’re wondering how to lower your property taxes, you’ve come to the right place. Here is my advice though. Before you make a decision to hire someone to help you reduce your property taxes (including my tax appeal company), wait until new assessments come out to determine if there is a real savings to be had. If you live in Sacramento or Placer County, for example, the Assessor has not yet posted their latest assessments yet, so it doesn’t make much sense to dispute your taxes until you know what their assessment is going to be for 2010.

Why am I telling you this? Because I am committed to being honest with you about the property tax appeals process and how you can save money. If it looks like the Assessor has your value wrong, I am glad to partner with you to help the Assessor understand true market value. My company’s fees are very reasonable too. On the other hand, if it looks like the Assessor has your property assessed accurately, you don’t need to do a thing.

If you want me to send you an email reminder when new assessments come out, click “contact” in the upper right hand corner of my tax appeal website, and I’ll get in touch with you soon. For now, if you have any questions about appealing your property taxes, or if there is anything I can do for you, let me know. Thank you.

By the way, the Sacramento County Assessor’s Office typically publishes their new assessments in the month of May, but right now they are expecting to get this information out at the very beginning of July. You can expect Placer County to get their information out in July also.

Sacramento Region Property Tax Appeals
TEL: 916.595.3735
FAX: 916.361.1964
www.SacramentoTaxAppeals.com
info@SacramentoTaxAppeals.com

NOTE: This advice is good for a traditional “decline in value” tax appeal only (it’s not applicable to a base year appeal or calamity reassessment….).

You probably didn’t wake up this morning wondering about fourplex sales in the city of Modesto. But if you did, you’re in luck. Even if you didn’t though, have a look at the trend graph below because it’s shocking to see the huge difference in property values from three years ago to now. What do you see? What stands out to you?

If you are a home owner or work in the real estate field, I’d be curious to hear your take not only on the data above, but on property assessments too. Unfortunately I’m finding it especially true that multi-unit 2-4 income-producing properties are often not assessed accurately (even worse than single family homes). Are you seeing a similar trend? Why do you think duplexes and fourplexes often seem to escape the realm of lowered values by the assessor?

If you are a property owner or investor and feel the Assessor has not kept in tune with the reality of the downward trend in property values, let’s talk. Call me at 916.595.3735 or see my property tax appeal website at www.SacramentoTaxAppeals.com.

Home owners and real estate agents ask me property tax questions all the time, so I figured it would be helpful to make a video to answer some of the most common questions. In the video below or HERE I walk you through the calendar year of events and deadlines surrounding reducing your property taxes so you can know what to expect throughout the year. 

Common Questions Covered in the Video: When is the best month to appeal property taxes in Sacramento or another local county? What date does the Assessor base my property value on? Why is it not a good idea to respond to the “reduce your taxes” mailers in February and March? When do new assessed values come out in Sacramento and surrounding counties like Placer? Why does the Assessor have a positive publicity campaign before releasing new assessed values? When is the deadline for disputing property taxes?

Please see www.SacramentoTaxAppeals.com for additional information and let me know if you have any questions. You can use the “Contact” page on the website to let us know about your property so we can do FREE research to determine if there is any potential savings for you on your property tax bill. You may also call 916-595-3735, or email info@SacramentoTaxAppeals.com. Thank you.

Do you have any questions about property tax appeals? In your experience, has your local Assessor valued your property correctly over the years?

As you may know, I run a property tax appeal website for property owners in the Greater Sacramento Region. I help home owners dispute their property taxes when it makes good economic sense for them to do so (only if there is a savings to be had). I mention this because I am very pleased to have learned last week that the Sacramento County Assessor reduced my own property taxes by $36,622 after viewing the evidence I presented for a lowered opinion of value. They agreed with my value and the tax refund will be roughly $350. 

This is not a huge sum of money. There are certainly clients that will save $10,000+ because of the work my company provides. Yet at the same time, every dollar counts and I’d much rather save $350 than relinquish my hard-earned greenbacks to the local Assessor.

The wild thing is that these were property taxes for 2008. I turned in the Application for Changed Assessment in November 2009 and the Assessor just got back to me about these taxes last week - sixteen months later.

If you think you are a good candidate for lowering your property taxes, then it’s important to take action before the deadline for appealing property taxes comes (that’s either September 15 or November 30 depending on which county you live in). Had I not actually formally disputed my own taxes in November 2009, I would have been out of luck, and the Assessor would not be cutting me a check. I don’t know about you, but I’m a big fan of getting checks in the mail.

I’m happy to answer any questions. Give me a call at 916-595-3735 or shoot me an email at ryan@SacramentoTaxAppeals.com.

A local realtor named Jesse Garcia of Keller Williams Realty interviewed me last week and the video is live today. We talked about the real estate market in Sacramento, property values, property tax appeals, and Project 680. Jesse is a good guy and I feel honored for the opportunity to chat a bit in his “Information You can Use” blog series. You can view more videos in Jesse’s series on his YouTube channel or on The Sacramento Real Estate Tube. Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

Today I took the last batch of property tax appeals for the year to the Sacramento County Assessment Appeals Board at 700 H Street in Sacramento (as pictured below). Before I headed out of the office though I thought it would be interesting to calculate the difference between the Assessor’s property tax assessment and my calculation of fair market value. Guess what, when considering only these eight tax appeals, the Assessor’s Office had these properties valued higher by $2,860,000, which essentially means local property owners were scheduled to pay $30,000 more in property taxes than they should this year. Ouch.  

Today was the last day to appeal property taxes for 2009 in Sacramento County (and in most if not all counties in California). If you did not dispute your taxes this year, you will have the opportunity to do so next year. You can expect new assessments for 2010 to come out at some point between May to July 2010 depending on which county you are located in. The assessment appeals period will then go from July 2010 to either September 15, 2010 or November 30, 2010 (depending on which county you are located in). Remember, your property assessment for next year will be based on your property’s value on January 1, 2o10.

If you have any questions or a story to share, comment below.

www.SacramentoAppraisalBlog.com Assessor Value vs. Market Value: A Difference of 2.86 Million Dollars

Yesterday I posted a graph showing the difference between assessed value and market value. Today I have one more real-life example of this phenomenon. The property below was assessed at $210,000, and after my tax appeal process I determined the home to be worth $130,000. That’s quite a difference and represents roughly $800 in taxes. Ouch.

The subject property is around 1400 square feet and all blue dots above represent the past 2.5 years of neighborhood sales between 1200-1700 square feet. This range of square-footage is meant to show comparable properties to the subject since a typical buyer would likely look in this range when house hunting. The vertical line represents January 1, 2009, which is the date of assessment.

As you can see, an assessed value at $210,000 looks higher than basically all sales in the neighborhood, and actually more consistent with a home value from previous months or years. It’s true that a property can sometimes sell at the highest level in the neighborhood, but the subject property does not warrant such a circumstance. When observing recent sales above $150,000 in the market, it’s clear that the vast majority of these sales come from superior tracts in the market area or are remodeled throughout (sold above all other sales because of upgrades). 

I am not saying the Assessor’s Office gets it wrong in every case. That’s not true, and I certainly do not wish to vilify the Assessor because that’s not the way I do things. I’m simply saying that in this case, and in others I have worked on lately, assessed value should have been much lower. I typically take on tax appeal situations where the home owner is clearly over-assessed, and so there is an obvious potential economic savings to be had. Most of the properties I did not take on this year were assessed fairly well or off by 5-10% (too high). 

If you have questions, give me a call at 916-595-3735.

www.SacramentoAppraisalBlog.com The Assessor says $210k, but Market Value is $130k: A Real Life Property Tax Appeal Situation

This is a graph I put together earlier today for a home owner as part of the total package for appealing his property taxes. All dots represent model match sales over the past three years in a specifically defined neighborhood in the Sacramento area. The Assessor’s Office bases their value for this year on January 1, 2009, which is represented by the vertical line. For reference, I also included all model match sales through November 2009. What do you see? How does this graph strike you?

When looking at all model match sales, it’s not hard to see that the Assessor valued this property too high. In this case, the assessed valued was only about $30,000 higher than true market value, but this amount is still $300+ out of the home owner’s pocket for the year. It’s more common for me to help property owners dispute their taxes for residential properties when there is a greater savings of $500, $1000 or even thousands of dollars, but in this instance the home owner felt strongly about moving forward to contest the Assessor’s value.

Let me know if you have any questions. You are welcome to call me at 916-595-3735 or visit www.SacramentoTaxAppeals.com. Remember, the deadline for appealing property taxes in many counties surrounding Sacramento is November 30, 2009.

www.SacramentoAppraisalBlog.com The Assessor’s Value vs. True Market Value

I wrote previously about the “Bursting of the Duplex Market in Sacramento“, so I figured I’d also provide a graph of the fourplex market so we can see visually what has taken place over the past three years in Sacramento County. Yes, I know Sacramento County is a large territory representing many neighborhoods and sub-markets, but I think this trend graph tells a story nonetheless. All blue dots below are sales based on data in Sacramento MLS.

Isn’t it amazing to see the impact of the housing bubble burst? Three years ago many quadruplex units in Sacramento County were selling between $400,000 to $600,000, but the bulk of sales lately have been easily hovering around $200,000 +/- or lower. With prices so low right now, many investors have understandably been purchasing 4-plex units. The ideal scenario would be to pick up a quadruplex, have postive cash flow, and then re-sell the property in a number of years when the market turns around.

I actually just finished a property tax appeal for an investor who purchased a fourplex in late 2009 for under $200,000, but the Assessor still had his property valued in the high $300,000s. He is scheduled to pay over $1,000 too much in property taxes this year because the Assessor’s records are not consistent with realistic trends in the marketplace. This is a common problem for so many properties that sold near the top of the market and are now re-selling in today’s market.

Let me know if you have any questions. Comments are welcome. Ryan 916-595-3735.

www.SacramentoAppraisalBlog.com The Crashing of the Fourplex Market in Sacramento

This is an important reminder. The deadline to appeal property taxes in Sacramento County and most surrounding counties is November 30, 2009. I run a website called www.SacramentoTaxAppeals.com to help property owners in the Greater Sacramento Region in the process of disputing property taxes. We also handle commercial tax appeals depending on the property. We’ve been getting quite a few calls from local property owners lately because the deadline is quickly approaching.

Disputing property taxes does not make good economic sense for everyone, but if it does (or might) for you, let’s talk. If you have questions about the appeals process and whether you might be a good candidate to contest your property taxes this year, feel free to call 916-595-3735 or email me at ryan@SacramentoTaxAppeals.com.

www.SacramentoAppraisalBlog.com  Tax Appeal Reminder: November 30, 2009 Deadline for Sacramento County (and many local counties)