Although you probably have not realized it, Greg Andrews or a member of his staff has been to your house or business and driven past your property three other times in the last four years.
There is nothing sinister about it, though. It’s just part of the job.
At the end of June, Andrews, the Lowndes County tax assessor, completed his state-mandated, four-year re-appraisal, a task that took two months to compile.
But the process is far more involved than that.
“It’s really something we are doing year-round,” Andrews said. “Each year, we visit a quarter of the properties and drive by the others. That means at the end of the four years, we’ve visited every property in the county and driven past them three other times.”
During those visits, Andrews and his staff take note of properties with foreclosure notices, for sale signs, expansions — anything that might affect the assessed tax value of the property.
The re-appraisals are staggered. Each year, roughly a quarter of the state’s 82 counties will have completed it’s four-year assessment.
Clay County’s assessment was also completed this year, while Oktibbeha County’s re-appraisal will completed in 2018.
Based on the data, overall tax assessments for both Clay and Lowndes counties are up slightly compared to the 2012 assessment.
In Lowndes County, personal property (commercial property) is up by $30 million compared to 2012, while real property (housing and rental housing) is up by $10 million.
The combined tax value comes to almost $1 billion.
Broken down by individual properties, 694 properties (2 percent) saw an increase in assessed value, while roughly 3,000 properties (9 percent) saw a decline.
Andrews said most of the increases in housing assessment came in pockets within both the city and county.
“You see increases in Elm Lakes and in Caledonia in the county and in the city, you see it mostly in Cady Hills extended,” Andrews said. “That doesn’t mean that the increases are just in those areas, but that’s where you see concentrations of increases.”
Even among properties that saw a loss in assessed value, those decreases are minor, Andrews said.
“Probably 95 percent of those saw a decrease of 1-4 percent,” he said. “That means most of the assessments are the same as they were in 2012. That’s about 27,000 properties that didn’t increase or decrease.”
For home and business owners, that means the property taxes paid each year won’t change much for some and not at all for most.
Don West of Coldwell Banker West Reality, who has been in the real estate business in Columbus since 1969, said homeowners and potential homeowners should not put too much emphasis on the tax assessed value.
“I’d say 95 percent of the time, the true market value is either going to be substantially lower than the tax appraised value or substantially higher,” West says. “The tax assessment is based on comparatively few factors compared to the real market value.”
West said while real estate values do take note of the tax assessed values of homes, it is just one of many factors they weigh. Far more important, he says, are “comps,” – what similar properties in the area have sold for. As chairman of the area’s Multiple Listing Service, West takes careful note of those sales.
Based on that, he said, real estate prices have remained stable for quite some time.
“Other than being low in inventory, especially in the city, we’re in a far better situation in our housing market than we were in 2006 and 2007, when the housing crisis hit,” West says. “Prices have stabilized. Normally, you would expect to see a 1 or 2 percent increase a year at the most. Really, the bigger factor for us is interest rates, which have remained low.”
West says even homeowners who have seen the tax-assessed values on their homes decrease shouldn’t be worried.
“Not a bit,” he says. “It’s just one mathematical element in determine the market value, and a small one at that.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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