I thought real estate was in the dumps. After all, all we have heard for the last few years is about foreclosures, underwater mortgages, short sales, falling prices, declining values and so on. I guess my local property assessor has been listening to some other news source.
Let me start at the beginning. Every four years in Tennessee each county property assessor is required to reappraise all properties within their jurisdiction and adjust them to the “fair market value.” 2013 is a reappraisal year here in (Memphis) Shelby County, TN. That means that all properties have to be reappraised since their last reappraisal four years ago in 2009. What do you think has happened to values since 2009?
So far I have received reappraisal notices for about half of my properties and amazingly my values have gone up almost a quarter of a million dollars!
Now, I do consider myself pretty savvy when it comes to determining a property’s value, and I always look for the good deal, but damn I did not know I was that good! (Insert sarcasm here).
So it looks like I will be challenging several of my appraised values again this year. It is not really difficult to do and I have done it several times before. I will be blogging about my experience here. So join the fun and follow along. It should be interesting to learn how they developed their “fair market values.”
