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Tax Assessments Not Based On Home's Current Value

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Apr 29, 2009 8:31 pm US/Mountain

Tax Assessments Not Based On Home's Current Value

Reporting
Terry Jessup
DENVER (CBS4) ― County assessors want residents to know the property tax assessment they'll soon be getting in the mail is not based on their home's current value.

When metro area property owners start getting their notices of valuation in the mail, many will expect their tax assessment will go down because of the meltdown in the real estate market. But county tax assessors are warning that may not be the case because the assessment is based not on what their property is worth today, but on market prices as they existed back on June 30 of 2008.

"In Jefferson County, I think we're going to have a record turnout of people protesting, that's my view," said Jim Everson, Jefferson County Assessor.

Since 2007, in Jefferson County, property values for single-family homes have gone down 3.1 percent. In the city and county of Denver, they've decreased an average of 3.2 percent. But those property owners should not assume their tax assessment will also go down.

"They must take your value to June 30 of 2008," said JoAnn Groff, State Property Tax Administrator. "What that means for people that want to protest their value is they need to think about what was their value as of June 30 of 2008."

The property value assessment is always complicated.

"Through Centennial area, it's either some are going down, some are going up. We look at neighborhood specific," said Corbin Sakdol, Arapahoe County Assessor.

Assessors fear all the foreclosures and for sale signs may have Coloradans thinking property values are worse than they really are.

"There wasn't the huge drop that we saw, or are seeing, in California, Arizona and Nevada," said Gil Reyes, Adams County Assessor. "We are not impacted like those states."

While the real estate market is better in Colorado than in many other states, a tax watchdog group does believe there will be record number of homeowner protests if their property tax assessment does go up.

"I think they're going to say how on Earth, in this economy, could it do any better than zero increase," Jeff Monroe with Tax Watchdog said.

Residents have until June 1 to file a protest to the property value assessment that will be sent out soon. There are multiple ways to do it.

County assessors say one of the best ways to determine if an assessment is fair is by going to the county's Web site and finding the sales data base for a specific neighborhood.

(© MMIX CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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