? about home values and property taxes?

[twoxcell]

I was checking out a listing for a house that sold a few blocks away from ours. After looking at it on Zillow I am dumb founded. This house is about as close to the same size as ours that you could get. The lot size, bedroom size, and SQft are very similar. Our house is a 1939 and this one is 1915 so a bit older. The house sold for 91,000 which in our neighborhood is pretty high. According to zillow the house is worth around 83,000 and ours is worth around 69,000(Which is what we paid for it 11 years ago.) What is really confusing me is this other house that is supposedly worth more than ours has a much lower tax rate. Tax valued at around 47,000 and payed 731 dollars in taxes last year. Where our house tax value is around 64,000 and we paid 988 dollars in taxes last year. :huh: Assuming zillow is accurate on the numbers, what in the world is going on here? I know very little about these things. We are hoping to sell our house soon and would be happy just to get out of it paying off what we owe and covering fees ect. :confused1:

[zoobie]

Google your county tax website. You can search for the property tax records and get more information. Here, the tax assessor rates each house's condition. A smaller house in excellent or very good condition could pay more than a larger house in good or poor condition.

 

I bet the tax assessed value increases for it after the sale. It may not have been assessed recently.

 

People over a certain age get reduced property taxes here because they don't have to pay the school tax. Other places do this differently. Maybe the owners were elderly and the county freezes assessments?

 

Don't take zillow's home values as gospel. They're more accurate when there has been a recent sale, but it's a computer algorithm, not a human evaluation. :)

[TravelingChris]

Our taxes doubled after we bought our house.  Why?  Because we are not older than 65.  The people who sold us the house were.  Something like that may be going on.

[twoxcell]

Interesting. I'm wondering if the last time they were assessed the house was in poor condition and someone recently remodeled. Maybe their taxes will go up soon. I know those sites aren't always accurate but it seemed like huge discrepancy in assessed tax value.

[Arcadia]

It depends on the age of the owners and when the house was last sold. There is very little adjustments when property prices go up until there is a sale, than the assessed tax value goes up. If property prices go down significantly, we can petition for an adjustment downwards of our assessed tax value.

[LMA]

I would not use Zillow as the tax info. Check your city's tax database.

[G5052]

Yes, Zillow is just a "ballpark" estimate.  Last time I looked the values in our neighborhood were all over the map because last summer a fixer-up, "as-is" house sold for way below the tax assessment, and then another sold just a few months ago for way above the tax assessment because there was a bidding war over it.  So the adjoining values reflect that, which is not entirely accurate.

 

They just reassessed and will be providing the new values this summer.  It will be interesting to see what they come up with.  I know that the last time they did that, several neighbors felt that they came out too high and successfully challenged it.  We came out low, and were quite happy of course.