SMARTERLANDLORDING

ADVICE FROM EXPERIENCE

Property Assessments

Tax Appeal Deadline July 31

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The deadline to file an appeal with the Shelby County, TN Board of Equalization  is rapidly approaching.  If you want to challenge your recent property appraisal by the Shelby County Assessor’s Office, you have until July 31st to file.  I will be filing appeals for several properties.

You can download the forms you need and file online here.

A word of caution though, if you file online you will not get a receipt.  There will be no record that you have filed.  I would recommend printing out your forms from the link above and actually taking them in person to the office to get a receipt.  You do not want to “get lost in the mail” so to speak.

Update #4 – Property Reappraisal Challenges

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I have reviewed all of my property reappraisal notices.  To see what I have done previously in this process see here, here and here.  Some I can agree with and can see the logic behind the valuation while others I simply cannot explain.  Some of my properties’ values more than doubled in just one year for example.  With others, the value significantly increased while surrounding properties’ values were lowered.

Sometimes the Property Assessor did not even use comparable sales to value my properties.  They used “replacement cost,” meaning they added up the cost of the “bricks and mortar” needed to replace the property.  Using replacement cost really makes no sense.  For example, think of a run down section of your town or city, imagine building a house there using $1 million worth of materials (marble, quartz, gold fixtures, you name it!).  Is the home you built worth $1 million, or does location, location, location come into play?

Anyway, I asked for and received an “informal review” of several of my properties’ valuations.  This is a process whereby the staff of the Assessor’s office takes a look at the new values.  The results of this process were mixed.  Some properties were reduced to the old values (yeah!), some were reduced a little bit but not all the way (hmmmm?) and others were left where they were, too high (nope!).

So now we go on and upward with a formal appeal to the Board of Equalization.  At the very least, the informal review process reduced the number of formal appeals I need to make, so it is valuable to do.  I also must say that the staff of the Assessor’s office was at all times helpful and professional.  They returned phone calls (many times), listened to my reasoning and were as helpful as they could be.

If you live in Shelby County, TN the deadline to file is July 31, so be sure and get your paperwork in if you plan on appealing.  I plan on appealing several and I will be writing about that here in the future.

Update – Property Reappraisal Challenges

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This is an update to my previous post, I Thought Real Estate Was In the Dumps.  It is a property reappraisal year where I live and despite the down real estate market the county property assessor seems to think we are in the boom times.  Follow along with me as I go through the process of challenging these appraisals.

I have received more property reappraisal notices over the past week.  So far I am looking at an even greater supposed substantial increase in property value for 2013.

The first step in challenging these appraisals is to find out what basis the property assessor used to determine these values.  The basis is generally comparable sales or “comps.”  I went to the property assessors office and asked to see the comps for my various properties.  This information is generally public record and all you need to do is ask for it.

So now I am armed with the info that the assessor used to value my properties.  I will be analyzing it over the coming weeks and will let you know what I find.

I will also note here that the staff in the assessor’s office were very helpful and I could not have been treated better.  I was in and out of the office in about 15 minutes.  It is always refreshing to get good service.