In certain years a blanket assessment is enacted resulting in a re-assessment of property taxes. Often inaccurate “quick” values are concocted. Many times adjustment is enacted using a multiplier factor to adjust these values. Little time is allocated to this rendering of property value.

Ask yourself: if you were an appraisal company bidding on a municipal revaluation contract and your winning bid had only a $40 margin allocated for every home you needed to appraise, how much time would you spend on each property? Being a businessman, you would want to make a profit, so you have to cut out the time spent on each property. Compound that by a hired hand that may have little experience and you could have a hit and miss mess as a result.

What we are saying is that errors abound in the blanket real estate tax appraisal of properties. If the blanket appraisal company or town uses multipliers, there is no way that you can take those bad initial assessment numbers and turn them into accurate numbers by multiplying them by another figure.

An inexpensive fix for the town could come about if building inspectors and the tax department communicated closely by working together. If the building inspector passed on information to the assessor, there would be no need for blanket re-assessments. New homes sold need only be equalized with the previous blanket assessment. If an addition or home improvement took place, the added value could be passed on to the tax assessor. If the building department and tax department worked efficiently, there would be no need for blanket reassessments.

The department of the tax assessor is usually small and little time is available for the assessor. Rarely do they appraise a home personally. The tax assessor job is often a politically appointed position. Tax assessors do not take the time and are not generally trained to do a complete market appraisal of a home. Often they use a completely different method (cost method) of appraising a home.

Selling prices of homes are constantly changing. When appealing your property taxes, only market value holds weight. Your home must equal the current selling price of other comparable home in your area.

A town expends a tremendous amount of money in the mass appraisal of homes. That cost is passed on directly in the local property tax causing extra tax rate increases. Much valuable time, effort and money is misspent by relying on blanket reassessment by communities. They may catch the occasional shed or deck built without a permit, but that hardly demands a reappraisal.

This spells out gigantic loopholes for homeowners. Doing a simple analysis of your home’s market value and seeing how it lines up with the appraised value can save thousands of dollars wasted on taxes.