Any advice on protesting Property Tax Valuations

So, we get our Tax Appraisal Notice in the mail this week, and I open it up to find that the home that we purchased last summer has apparently jumped in value about 15% since we bought it, at least according to the county appraisal office, which is kind of amazing given how little home values have climbed in the region and my city specifically over the last year.

Out of curiousity, I also check the values of the other homes on my block. Now, my block is not fully built out, yet. There are 8 individual properties on the block, seven of which are identical to my home (and when I say "identical", I mean they're exactly the same. Same floorplan, builder, everything).

As it turns out, my home (and the home immediately next door to mine, which is valued the same as mine) has the highest valuation on the block. It's near 28% higher than one identical property across the street (which actually lost value from last year) and about 5% higher than the next highest valued identical property on the block with the others closer within $1,000-$2,000 of that next highest valuation (and at least one home a block over that's 35% larger than ours is valued only 6% higher than ours. That's all I've looked at so far).

So, we figure a protest of the valuation is probably in order as it's unlikely the market value of these identical homes varies that much within a matter of a few feet of location.

Since I've never done this before, I wondered if anyone had any generalized advice if they've been through it.

If we really could sell the house for the amount the valuation says it's worth, I'd do it in a second (especially since the builder that built our home is selling significantly larger houses in the same neighborhood for roughly the same as our valuation says our house is worth).

 

Thanks for the advice, everybody.

 

Wow. In continuing my research, I think I discovered how the county appraiser arrived at the valuation of the homes on my block.

Our neighborhood is actually zoned for townhomes, so when the builder built the houses, they build two at a time and connect each set of two with a weird little "bridge" thing between the houses (I know it's hard to picture, but the houses share no walls, but they have this little patio-cover-looking thing that juts out from the side of the house and connects it to one next to it).

Looking at the appraisals, I see that each home is valued at the same amount as the one its connected to. The appraiser apparently took the higher sales price of the two connected homes, added 3 percent and applied the value to both homes. And, as it turns out, my immediate neighbors paid far more for their house than anyone else on the block.

Of course, the problem (to me, anyway) is that the highest price was paid by the first buyers. If it's really "market price", the values in our neighborhood actually fell last year. We bought three months after my immediate neighbors and paid a good bit less than they did. The people across the street bought a couple of weeks after us and paid slightly less than we did (they actually bought both available houses. The buyer lives in one and rents out the other.) The people down the street bought nearly two months after we did and paid about the same as we did (slightly more than across the street). An investor bought both of those houses at the same time and rents them both out.

I don't know how the other one on the block fits in (which has a significantly lower valuation than anyone else), but it was sold a full years before ours was. I haven't been able to discover how much they paid, but theirs is the only house that is not identical to the one next to/connected to it.

Anyway, that may not be how they arrived at the valuations, but the math works. And I thought I'd never use math in my regular life.

 

We had our property tax hearing a couple of weeks ago (followed the advice here for the hearing) and received the results in the mail today.

The District knocked the appraisal down to the amount we paid for the house last summer, which is probably about what the market value is given how recently the house sold and how values, overall, are pretty stable around here. I was actually expecting them to take the sales price from last summer and add 3% as kind of a compromise (which is how they arrived at the value of my immediate neighbor's home. He bought his house just a couple of months before we bought ours), so I was pleasantly surprised they went even lower.

So, I chalk that up as a success, especially since it meant knocking about 7% off their original valuation.