Drees, Toll Brothers, Negotiable Base Price?

[Rakin]

Not totally understanding your problem but Drees is one of the better builders around. They are fair, honest and do a good job building. Don't base values off the tax records. Most of the time they are wrong.

Sounds like you may have a communication problem with them. Do you have an agent helping you ? You should consider finding a good one.

[bricor]

You can't base new (or existing) home prices off collincad. The reason hew homes are lower is because when everyone fills out their new home survey form from the county, they put down that they paid $50k less (or pick your number) than they really did.
Everyone likes to use it as a reference when it works in their favor but that doesn't make it accurate or realistic.

[Big G]

As others have said, the CollinCAD numbers are all over the board on new construction. Where I live, one of my neighbors has a house assessed for more than $100K over my house, even though we have the same floorplan, and our house has a bigger lot and a larger master bath.

Why? Because they used some "creative" financing to borrow 100% of the purchase price. Since loan documents are filed with the county, the tax man has access to that information when determining house values. (Actually, anybody can look those documents up online. Hope you remembered to take your SSN off of them.)

[Grainraiser]

Wish I would have hired a realtor when I had my house built. I could have saved some money if I would have. I was a first time home buyer and it was before the internet. Lesson learned and it's mistake that will not be repeated.

[bricor]

I thought the loan documents were not available which is why it's hard to know what anyone here actually pays for their house.
On both my houses, we received a survey asking what we paid. Not sure why they would bother asking if they had access to the loan documents.

Originally Posted by Big G

As others have said, the CollinCAD numbers are all over the board on new construction. Where I live, one of my neighbors has a house assessed for more than $100K over my house, even though we have the same floorplan, and our house has a bigger lot and a larger master bath.

Why? Because they used some "creative" financing to borrow 100% of the purchase price. Since loan documents are filed with the county, the tax man has access to that information when determining house values. (Actually, anybody can look those documents up online. Hope you remembered to take your SSN off of them.)

[Big G]

They don't have access to the purchase price, just the amount borrowed. That's what shafted my neighbors - having borrowed the full purchase price against the house, they couldn't very well argue the house was not worth that much.