Don’t just tell me, show me. In all my tax appeals and appraisals, I like to visually display what is happening in the market. It helps get a point across and sometimes shows a certain trend too. In the case below, a home owner in the Hillcrest neighborhood in Folsom contacted me about disputing his property taxes. As you can see, the Sacramento County Assessor’s Office had his property assessed around $940,000. When looking at the graph though, does something seem suspect? Being that there were zero sales above $900,000 over the past 2+ years in the entire City of Folsom, there are some red flags. Granted, there could definitely be a reason why a property is valued as a “lone ranger” (especially in Hillcrest), but in this case after my valuation was complete, true value was $140,000 less than assessed value (that’s about $1,750 in property taxes).

What do you think of the graph? What trends have you seen in Folsom lately?

If you have any questions, or real estate appraisal or property tax appeal needs in the Greater Sacramento Region, contact Lundquist Appraisal by phone 916-595-3735, email, Facebook, Twitter or subscribe to posts by email.

I hit the jackpot yesterday when talking with a local realtor, and it ended up being a “two birds with one stone” situation. Here’s what happened.

Earlier in the day I emailed a Facebook Realtor friend and asked her if she ever sold a condo in a particular subdivision in the city of Folsom. There are ZERO recent condo sales in this subdivision in Empire Ranch, so I want to get as much firsthand information as possible. Well, my friend gave me a chunk of insight, but it turned out that she needed some help because she was having financing issues with one of her deals in the “Rivage” condo subdivision in Folsom.

Anyway, through the course of contacting listing agents for research for my appraisal, I talked with Realtor Ann Boswell of Insight Real Estate. I had never spoken with Ann before, but she ended up being a wealth of information for not only the subject subdivision, but for “Rivage” up the street. Ann spent a good 10-15 minutes on the phone with me (I love when Realtors take time like that. It’s good on so many levels). 

It turns out that since Rivage has not yet completed construction, some of the buildings are FHA approved and others are not. That could be an issue, don’t you think? It’s funny to think that despite these buildings being next door to each other in the same new development, some of them don’t make the cut (yet) to be guaranteed by HUD. More specifically, per HUD’s website, only buildings 1 and 13-26 are currently approved by HUD/FHA.

Two birds with one stone? One, I got insight into the subject subdivision. And Two, thanks to Ann Boswell I was able to resource my Facebook friend with information on Rivage and why her deal was maybe having some issues. But most of all, I was able to give my Facebook friend the name of someone at Wells Fargo who could help her get her condo on the HUD approved list.

You can search HERE to see the HUD/FHA approved condominium list.