Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - Heard of Equitax?
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Old 09-10-2010, 09:40 PM
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Hawkwind Hawkwind is offline
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I do not own property in TV at this time but I think it would be very hard to fight a property tax assessment in TV. The reason I say this is that the database of home sales is so great and there are so many of the same models being sold the owner will have a hard time questioning the assessment.

A number of years ago and well before the housing market crash the state of Ohio said that property values were rising at about 13% per year at that time. When the next assessment came out my property value went up 13.25% and was said to be based on similar homes sold in my area of the county. I had a couple of friends that both had Mc Mansions and their assessments also went up 13.25% to the penny. I checked with other friends who lived around the city and everyone's went up exactly 13.25% to the penny.

Okay what the county did was to increase the assement per what the state has come up with and not base it on sales of similar homes in your area. It was up to the home owner to challenge the county findings and get theirs changes. This is what I did and had the increase reduced to 3.25%. I have another property and was able to get it reduced to 5.45%.

The counties thinking is to raise everyone's value a certain amount and if the property owned does not like it let them challenge it knowing only a small percentage will. In the end the county comes out ahead and they really do not have to do anything but enter an increase percent into the computer and not do an actual assessment.

In my case the county could not come up with a home similar to mine within my area of the township that sold and they had nothing to compare to. My other property the auditor stated that the property across the street was a similar home and they used that to compare. I proved to the county auditor that the home across the street also came with a second lot that they included in their assessment. Oops.

One thing the counties in Ohio are doing to keep the tax base up with the value of homes going down is to increase the value of the land. It is next to impossibe to fight that because no new land can be created.

Now in TV this would not work as I said because there are so many homes of the same model to compare.

Sorry for the long post but I was just on the phone for about 45 minutes today with the county auditor.